Contact: Sally Widman, 610-409-3300
[email protected]
URSINUS STUDENT HISTORIAN DISCOVERS TODAY'S YOUNG WOMEN FACE HEALTH RISK FOR LACK OF INFORMATION
COLLEGEVILLE, Pa.-Ursinus College senior Catherine M. Murray, a history major from Philadelphia, never expected her honors research to uncover a potential threat to women's health.
Murray's thesis, a history of the American birth control pill, examines the pill's effect on the lives of American women since 1960.
Through her study, Murray learned that public attention to the pill has waned over three-plus decades of widespread use. Instead, the media are now more focused on AIDS and its prevention. Women generally are relaxed on the subject of the contemporary pill, which is less potent, has fewer side-effects, and is widely prescribed by doctors to patients of all childbearing years.
So Murray was startled to learn that, though the risks are much diminished, they still exist, and in fact, young women in the 15-to-24 age range who have never been pregnant are both most at-risk for breast cancer and most likely to use the pill. Their risk increases with years of use. Moreover, they are least-well informed and most blase about the pill's potential side effects. Worst of all, they have far less information about the pill available to them than was available to young women of the '60s and '70s.
"This ignorance has implications for the autonomy of today's women," Murray writes. "Until women begin to demand more information and to make informed decisions about birth control, their autonomy will continue to be sacrificed."
Murray's oral contraceptive history begins with the 1950s, an era when, under the Comstock laws, it was still illegal in some states for birth control information to be disseminated to the public or for doctors to give such information. From that time forward, she traces the slow evolution in public attitudes towards birth control, family planning, and women's perceptions of their proper roles. She also looks at societal concerns in the '60s over the population explosion, and in the '90s over disease prevention.
For her research, Murray examined advertisements and articles in women's magazines, Gallup and other polls, sex manuals, health guides, contemporary academic studies and medical journals from 1965 to 1979. She then compared information available to women in that time frame to the popular information available from 1990 to 1998. Murray also surveyed 50 college women, ages 18 through 24, who are currently on the pill, and 25 women who were 18 to 24, in college and on the pill between 1965 and 1979.
Three decades ago, the pill was thought of as being only for married women, Murray reports, whereas today it is the contraceptive method of choice for single women. Articles then promoted its potential social benefit in preventing a population explosion and its value as a family planning method. This coverage rarely mentioned that the pill allowed women to postpone childbearing for education, career and travel, or that it let them have sex without fear of pregnancy.
Today's articles are extremely short, by contrast, two or three paragraphs compared to two or three pages in earlier decades. Benefits such as convenience, freedom from fear of pregnancy and the independence the pill affords are emphasized, while side-effects are largely ignored. Murray discovered that if mentioned at all, the risks are portrayed inconsistently from article to article.
Though '70s media stayed away from the pill's liberating influences, Murray's responses from older women reveal that they appreciated all of the pill's benefits. These women, now in their 40s and 50s, also gave detailed responses to questions about the relative effectiveness of various birth control methods, their reasons for quitting the pill and their knowledge of side-effects. They were aware of the options, their comparative benefits and drawbacks. Most of this group also felt that birth control was the responsibility of the woman and took the initiative in this area.
By contrast, a majority of the current college women in Murray's sample believed that birth control is a shared responsibility. For fear of AIDS, 70 percent had used the pill along with condoms, unlike women in the older sample. They answered questions about the pill's benefits with ease, but stumbled over questions about side effects. They expressed no fear of the breast cancer risk and seemed to have no clue that theirs was the age group most vulnerable of all to it.
Most answered "I don't know," when asked to compare the relative merits of various birth control methods. Such fuzziness is not surprising, Murray says, considering the short space given to articles about the pill today. Medical journals do contain information about the age-related breast cancer risk, she said, but young women do not generally read these publications.
She discovered that although women of today have other options as effective as the pill that are cheaper and easier to use--the patch and the implant--most of the women in her survey knew nothing of them.
Next fall Murray will enter a Ph.D. program in history at Temple University, and plans to continue the research she began at Ursinus, with a view to combating the potentially dangerous ignorance of her generation. After earning her doctorate, she hopes to teach women's or American history at the university level.
Her paper is one of 32 written by Ursinus seniors who will receive honors in their majors at commencement. She will graduate Phi Beta Kappa with distinguished honors in history, and is also one of nearly 200 Ursinus students who presented their research this year at academic conferences.
Murray's faculty advisor, Professor C. Dallett Hemphill, chair of the Ursinus history department and author of "Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America" (Oxford, 1999) lauded her student's work: "Catherine listened to her evidence, even though it led her to make an argument contrary to her initial hypothesis. Her project exemplifies the benefits of undergraduate research. She has learned so much, because she has pursued questions that are important to her and found her own answers."
Ursinus, founded in 1869, is a highly selective, nationally ranked, independent, coeducational liberal arts college, located on a scenic, wooded 168-acre campus, 28 miles from Center City Philadelphia. Known for quality programs in the arts and sciences, it is one of only 8 percent of U.S. Colleges to possess a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
CC-2496c ###
RSS