A friend just sent me an alarming article from dallasnews.com. The headline read, “No-period birth control pill to be approved” and the tagline stated, “Women could suppress monthly bleeding indefinitely.” Wyeth, the company producing this new pill, calls it “Lybrel,” a name clearly meant to evoke a sense of liberation.

But liberation from what? Is menstruation something women need to be liberated from? What kind of world-view does this imply?

Dallas news reports that gynecologists have been seeing a slow but steady rise in women asking how to limit and even stop monthly bleeding. “Surveys have found up to half of women would prefer not to have any periods, most would prefer them less often and a majority of doctors have prescribed contraception to prevent periods. ‘I think it’s the beginning of it being very common,’ said Dr. Leslie Miller, a University of Washington-Seattle obstetrician-gynecologist who runs a Web site focused on suppressing periods. ‘Lybrel says, You don’t need a period.’”

As a man, I obviously don’t know what it’s like to experience that monthly fluctuation in hormones and the emotional roller coaster ride that often goes with it. PMS is something that men, I’m sure, can’t even imagine. But that’s precisely my point. Men are the kind of creatures that don’t have periods. Women are the kind of creatures that do. Is this mysterious difference between the sexes something to be eliminated? Does nature reveal an inherent prejudice against women by “inflicting” them with menstruation? If so, then many will consider “Lybrel” woman’s true savior.

This is precisely what anthropologist Ashley Montagu argued in an article entitled “Sex, Men, and Society.” Here, referring to the original birth control pill of the 1960's, he wrote, “The pill, by inhibiting the processes that lead to menstruation and suppressing that function, frees women from the psychologically handicapping conditions which were formerly tied to her physiology. With these removed, the last of the grounds for discrimination against women is removed, and women may at long last enter into that full social equality which, until the development of the pill, was so long denied them.”

Can one not see that just below the surface of this supposed bolstering of woman lies a deep and insidious misogyny, a rejection and even hatred of woman? If a woman must take a pill to claim “equality” with men, then she is buying in to the basic lie that she is not already equal in dignity as a woman. In this view, equality lies in technology, not in the true order of things. In other words, in this view, woman’s equality is a sham.

If menstruation were merely the end result of a cruel and meaningless biological evolution, then, like Montagu, I’d be all for helping women overcome their randomly inflicted “handicap.” But let’s step back for a moment and take a deeper look. People of faith cannot conclude that a woman’s monthly cycle is an evolutionary “mistake” to be dominated, manipulated, or obliterated by technology. Human fertility, as Scriptures has it, is the very first blessing that God bestowed upon the human race. “And God blessed them, and said to them, ‘Be fertile...’” (Gen 1:28).

Women today are trained instead to call their period their monthly curse. Whose message is that anyway? “Could it be...Satan!?” Church Lady jokes aside, this is a very serious matter. From the beginning Lucifer’s “enmity” has been aimed at woman and her ability to bare offspring (see Gen 3:15). Why? Because it is woman’s fertility that brought Christ to the world and the enemy is an anti-christ from the beginning.

Mary is the true model of woman’s liberation. It comes not from rejecting one’s fertility, but from embracing it – and this inevitably involves a taste of Christ’s cross. As we see in Mary, woman’s fertility is quite literally wrapped up in the salvation of the human race. No wonder there are forces at work that seek to obliterate it.