CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman does his best to ramp up the dread in a Jan. 2 blog post:
Grace Marwick, a former law student and now insurance claims handler, revealed that she developed a blood clot on her lung as a result of taking the contraceptive pill and, if the doctors had not uncovered the problem when they did, it could have caused her to suffer a stroke or killed her, reported the New York Post and several British papers on Jan. 1.
Marwick was a law school student in Ipswich, Suffolk, about 80 miles north of London in 2015. In May of that year, the doctor’s office at the school prescribed her the pill Gederel 30/150 as a form of contraception.
Chapman obviously seized upon this item to indict all contraception as harmful. Just one problem: Marwick’s story doesn’t actually fit Chapman’s narrative.One hint of that is Marwick’s message about her experience, which Chapman waits until the final paragraph of his host to note: “I just want to warn other women and encourage them to be careful and to go straight to the doctor’s if they have any unusual symptoms at all.”
But the key piece of evidence is something Chapman ignores completely. Both the New York Post and Daily Mail articles to which Chapman links make this important note: Marwick is now taking a different contraceptive pill, which she says “seems to be fine.”
In other words, Marwick’s incident was an unfortunate side effect of a specific pill — indeed, packaging for Gederel 30/150 lists a slightly elevated risk of a blood clot as a possible side effect.
Chapman’s attempt to implicitly smear all oral contraceptives as dangerous by withholding crucial information from his readers shows that he cares more about advancing a right-wing agenda than telling the truth.