(LifeSiteNews) — Tucker Carlson admitted that his views on the birth control pill were “radically changing” during a lengthy video interview with health activist Dr. Casey Means, who had said that “the pill” was the first medication “ever” that people “took for more than a couple weeks that didn’t cure the issue right away.”
In other words, “the pill” was the first product of the pharmaceutical industry that turned a segment of the American population into long-term customers, redirecting the vast majority of the profit-hungry industry’s focus away from cures and toward “management” of conditions, a far more profitable pursuit for Big Pharma.
Big Pharma doesn’t aim to cure; it keeps you sick while managing your medical condition. And the overhauling of the industry began with hormonal contraceptives 64 years ago.
“Chronic disease medications didn’t exist before 1960,” Means noted. “Zero percent of the medical project was on chronic conditions.”
“The first one was the birth control pill,” said Means, adding that it was the first pill that you took for more than a few weeks that didn’t cure the issue right away. “Ever!”
“Today, 95% of spending is on chronic conditions because what the system realized is that they can take the trust engendered after World War II with antibiotics and various medical innovations that helped to win that war and then steer it toward chronic conditions,” she explained.
“Chronic” doesn’t imply a dangerous or life-threatening condition; it simply describes conditions that are persistent or long-lasting. Rather than curing those conditions, Big Pharma focuses on “managing” them.
Another case in point is the antidepressant drug Valium. “By the 1970s, 30% of women in the United States were on Valium, a highly addictive drug,” Means said. Yet it had only been introduced in 1963.
Carlson: Criticizing the pill ‘not allowed’
Tucker Carlson, whose intellectual curiosity and honesty sets him apart in the world of mass media journalists, looked stunned and urged Means to continue on the topic of “the pill.”
“I just want to say upfront that, you know, I’m Protestant, never had a problem with birth control, never thought about it,” Carlson said. “That’s my position, or has been my position, which is actually radically changing as we speak.
“I’ve always felt that way, so I never thought about it,” he reemphasized. “But I always noticed that you were not allowed to criticize the pill. Period. That was not allowed in the world I grew up in.”
“You could have all kinds of kooky opinions, (but) you were not allowed to criticize the birth control pill,” Carlson said. “And now I feel like maybe we were played a little bit.”
Taking a hammer to women’s hormones
Means went on to explain how the applications of hormone-controlling medications first created for birth control are now used to address a wide variety of conditions:
These drugs have helped in some ways, but we are prescribing them like candy. We’re prescribing them for acne. We’re prescribing them for PCOS – polycystic ovarian syndrome – the leading cause of infertility in the United States, which is a metabolic issue driven by our food and how the food interacts with genetics. And then, of course, for birth control.
So you’ve got these medications that are literally shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical, life-giving nature of women.
We basically told women, ‘These hormones don’t matter. Your ability to create the most miraculous miracle of and miracles, which is (to) create life, just shut it down. There’s no impact.’
That’s crazy to me.
Means then went on to explain the danger that medical birth control treatments have caused for women.
Your cycle and having these normal hormonal cycles is part and parcel with our health in every possible way, and also with the miracle of creating life.
And so for years you just lose the biofeedback of what’s happening with your cycle. It is one of the key barometers of female health. How is your cycle doing? Is it regular, or is it heavy? And we just shut it down and we say there’s no repercussions for that, which I think gets to a larger issue, which is: a disrespect of life.
“By taking a hammer to women’s hormones,” Means said, “we’re destroying the things that give us life in this country. And that is part of the root cause why I think things feel so dark right now … we are actually turning our backs on life.”
The many dangers of oral contraception: Stroke, cancer, suicide, and much more
Since its inception, LifeSiteNews has reported incidents and research findings showing the dangers of stroke and other health issues related to chemical contraceptive use.
Evidence of strokes associated with the pill first came to light in 1962, not long after its introduction. Early versions of chemical contraceptives had higher doses of synthetic estrogen, and though the doses are lower now, there is still an associated risk.
The type of stroke women have greater risk for with the pill is an ischemic stroke, which makes up roughly 85 percent of all strokes and is caused by blood clots.
The pill has also been linked to social ills and many medical problems such as breast cancer, hair loss, increased risk of gestational diabetes, glaucoma and deadly blood clots, strokes, hardening of the arteries and cervical cancer.
In 2005, the World Health Organization declared chemical contraceptives to be a Group 1 Carcinogen, the highest classification of carcinogenicity, used only when there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans
A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry that found that women taking hormonal contraceptives have up to three times the risk of suicide as women who have never taken hormonal birth control.
Noting the study, Elon Musk posted on X, “Hormonal birth control makes you fat, doubles risk of depression & triples risk of suicide. This is the clear scientific consensus, but very few people seem to know it.”
Ashley St. Clair, a commentator for The Babylon Bee, retweeted Musk’s post and shared her harrowing experience with these chemicals from an early age.
I was placed on the pill at just 14 years old for acne. A few months later, I saw my first-ever therapist despite no prior history of depression. Shortly after that, I was placed on an SSRI (anti-depressant). Each time I would talk to my doctors about my deteriorating mental health, not a single one in nearly a decade of being on the pill suggested that it may in fact be the hormones I was taking every single day. Not one.
In retrospect, after being on birth control for nearly a decade, being placed on the pill for ‘acne’ was akin to killing a mouse with a rocket launcher. Though my anecdote is a story for another time, it is far from unique. Hundreds of thousands of women across the United States and the world have had a similar experience to mine – feeling completely out of their mind on a pill their doctor told them was relatively ‘harmless.’