Nuns should go on the Pill, says Lancet study

[ukhudshanskiy]

A paper in The Lancet claims that Roman Catholic nuns pay a “terrible price for their chastity”, as not having babies puts them at greater risk of breast, ovarian and uterine tumours.

This is because women who never give birth or breastfeed have more periods than those who do, and an increased number of menstrual cycles has been linked to higher cancer risk.

By contrast, the contraceptive pill has been shown to significantly reduce the chances of women developing ovarian and uterine cancers without increasing breast cancer risk.
“If the Catholic church could make the contraceptive pill freely available to all its nuns, it would reduce the risk of those accursed pests, cancer of the ovary and uterus, and give nuns’ plight the recognition it deserves.”
The opinion piece states that as long ago as 1713, an Italian physician noted that “nuns had an extremely high incidence of that ‘accursed pest’, breast cancer”.
It goes on: “Today, the world’s 94,790 nuns still pay a terrible price for their chastity because they have a greatly increased risk of breast, ovarian, and uterine cancers: the hazards of their nulliparity.”