ABSTRACT
Modern woman is a victim of her own success. One of her priorities was to have safe, effective contraception. A natural consequence of this is that we now have regular menstrual periods or withdrawal bleeds. If you summate the number of days a 21st century woman bleeds for throughout her lifetime it is between 4 and 6 years. Effective contraception had a major impact on the 20th century and within three generations of women there has been a complete role reversal. Our great grandmothers got married and had up to 17 children and spent most of their adult life pregnant and breast feeding. Most late 20th and 21st century women want one or two children and therefore the vast majority of their adult life is dominated by cyclical menstruation. Women now perceive periods as being ‘natural’ whereas one could argue they are highly unnatural. Women often ask for advice but do not necessarily want treatment, as they feel inducing amenorrhea by various methods would be ‘interfering with nature’. However, one could argue that amenorrhea is the ‘natural’ state of an adult primate.
