Ricki Lake producing documentary on the dangers of birth control pills

From The Papist: 

 Earlier this year she announced plans to produce an investigatory documentary on hormonal birth control.  What Upton Sinclair did in the Jungle to expose dark corners of the meat packing industry, and what Eric Schlosser did in Fast Food Nation to shine light into the fast food industry, so now Rikki Lake is seeking to do for the Billion dollar business of hormonal contraceptives.  Based on the book by Holly Grigg-Spall, Sweetening the Pill: Or how we got hooked on hormonal birth control, the documentary promises to be controversial since big drug companies have much to lose if the serious health risks that have been empirically verified are brought center stage to the nation’s news-media cycle.  The book’s website says the documentary should be out early 2015. 

Some background: 

Lake, the woman behind the 2008 life-changing documentary The Business of Being Born, has made hormonal birth control the focus of her next documentary. The film, called Sweetening The Pill, will be based on author Holly Grigg-Spall’s new bookSweetening The Pill Or How We Became Hooked On Hormonal Birth Control. The book, as Deadline Hollywood writes, will look into “the safety and long-term effects of hormonal birth control.”

It’s about time.

From Yaz to the Nuvaring, Lake and her Business of Being Born partner Abby Epstein want to take a hard look at the everyday risks women take to avoid pregnancy.

“In the fifty years since its release, the pill has become synonymous with women’s liberation and has been thought of as some sort of miracle drug,” said Lake and Epstein. “But now it’s making women sick and so our goal with this film is to wake women up to the unexposed side effects of these powerful medications and the unforeseen consequences of repressing women’s natural cycles.”

When I first saw the news about Sweetening The Pill, I was thrilled. Regardless of what you think about Lake and The Business of Being Born, anyone taking a closer look at childbirth or hormonal birth control can only be a good thing.