Nuns Should Be On The Pill

SYDNEY – Despite Catholic nuns taking a vow of chastity, two Australian researchers are convinced they should be on the pill.

In fact, Kara Britt and Roger Short who wrote about their findings in the medical paper The Lancet, insists that the 93,000 nuns around the world should have the right to take the pill not as a birth control means but to protect themselves against several forms of cancer.

The researchers state that it is exactly because of a vow of chastity that many nuns experience heavy menstrual bleeding and endometriosis, a gynecological medical condition in which cells from the lining of the uterus (endometrium) appear and flourish outside the uterine cavity, most commonly on the ovaries.

“Nuns pay a terribly high price for their chastity,” wrote Britt and Short. Women who never get pregnant have more menstrual cycles, which are link to increased risks of contracting breast cancer, ovary and uterus cancer.

Indeed, research has determined that women who get pregnant at a young age, breastfeed and have more children, have a notably lower risk for contracting breast cancer, including endometrial and ovary cancer.

To defend its position, The Lancet referred to a 1969 study conducted in the United States in which 32,000 nuns were examined. That study showed that nuns more often died from these types of cancers than ‘common’ women did.

Despite this evidence the opposition against putting nuns on the pill as a means to lower their cancer risks doesn’t just come from the head of the Catholic church but from nuns themselves.

Retired Fransican Sister and oncologist Beatrice Hernandez, asks if it is worth the money to provide all risk groups, in this case the nuns, with the pill to prevent thirteen cancers from occurring’.

Hernandez based her question on the fact that the medicine is very expensive and most nuns don’t contract the cancers in question until they are well over 70, even 80 years old.

Brit and Short countered the Sister’s question quoting the results of a 2010 study that indicates that the mortality rate of women who never took the pill and died from breast, ovary and uterus cancers is 12 percent higher than for woman who took the pill regularly.

The Catholic doctrine is against the use of any form of birth control, although Pope Benedict XVI, recently approved the use of condoms but only as a means to reduce the risks of contracting STDs.

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