HOW TO STOP YOUR PERIOD

How to Stop Your Period - For some women, having a period is a sacred moment, while for many, it’s felt to be an inconvenience. For others, that monthly flow brings on intense side effects like cramping, mood swings, and heavy bleeding that can make doing daily activities feel impossible. No matter which side of the coin you’re on, you may have considered whether you should stop your period and, if you were to do so, how you can go about it.
The answer is, it depends on a lot of different factors.
There are many people—both medical professionals and professional menstruators — that say stopping or skipping your period is perfectly safe. One of the main points that people who are for stopping periods make is that there are many times in a woman’s life when her period is naturally MIA, like when she’s pregnant or breastfeeding. Another angle to this point of view is based on the knowledge that, while estrogen causes your uterine lining to thicken, progesterone keeps it thin. When you’re using hormonal birth control to skip or stop your period, the progesterone keeps your uterine lining from building up, thus leaving nothing for your uterus to shed for a period. Those who are “Team Stop Your Period” believe that suppressing your period for either medical reasons (like if you have menorrhagia) or for recreational reasons (like not wanting to deal with possible period leaks at the beach) is safe.
On the other side of the fence, there are many people who understand why some women may want to stop their periods but can’t get behind the trend of menstrual suppression. They believe that encouraging women to stop their periods is just another way that pharmaceutical companies are medicalizing women’s bodies. It is described as, “seeing and treating natural experiences and socially-created problems as biological diseases or illnesses that require medical surveillance or intervention.” This line of thinking speaks to how women are made to feel as though their periods are not natural when, in fact, they are and have been a part of the female biology for as long as humans have existed. It’s not just political, however. There are real health concerns about stopping your period—whether it’s for a few months or many years. Actually, there are concerns about the use of hormonal birth control, period. That’s a discussion for another day, though.
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