The Pill

The pill. I don’t need to say anything else; you know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t you think that makes “the pill” incredibly elitist, if not just plain smug?

I’m not going to comment on the so-called debate raging about the pill. (You totally thought I was going to, huh? Fooled you!) I’m just going to talk about how exactly it works.

The pill contains synthetic hormones: estrogens and progesterone. Hormones are chemical messengers. They travel through the body and attach to specific kinds of cells, and in doing so, strongly suggest that the cell do a certain thing.

Progesterone is a very important player in the whole being-a-woman game. It’s involved in the regulation of the menstrual cycle, and it’s very important during pregnancy–yes, that thing that the pill generally prevents. That’s what’s so interesting about it. In a way, the pill tricks the body into thinking it’s already pregnant.

Yes, uterus. It does sound very strange. But one of progesterone’s jobs during pregnancy is to stop the whole ovulating and menstruating cycle. Because obviously, if you’re already pregnant, you don’t need to be doing either of those things.

Non-pill-taking, un-pregnant women generally release an egg each month. A highly synchronized ballet of hormones is responsible for this. There are 5 main hormones that regulate a woman’s ovulation:

GnRH comes from the hypothalamus, a gland in the brain. It tells the anterior pituitary, a nearby gland in the brain to make FSH and LH.

FSH goes down and tells the ovaries to get ready to release an egg.

The ovary starts releasing estrogens. The estrogens encourage the hypothalamus to release more GnRH, which then makes the anterior pituitary secrete more FSH and LH.

Pretty soon there is an abundance of LH around, and this causes ovulation to happen.

Now, the progesterone in the pill keeps this whole thing from happening by stopping the hypothalamus from releasing GnRH, so the whole cascade doesn’t happen.