CHICAGO - Little girls can't wait to grow up. We mess around with lipstick and makeup as soon as we're big enough to root through Mommy's purse.

Our birthday money goes to lip gloss and nail polish.

And then, we are "a woman" - and spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture fragments of our girlhood.

But until recently, there was one aspect of femaleness that we were taught we could do nothing about, that irksome monthly matter at the very core of womanhood. There are good reasons our mothers and grandmothers called this physical phenomenon "the curse."

That monthly period was the price we paid for our double X chromosomes. Pregnancy and (sometimes) its corollary, breast-feeding, were the only methods of putting a stop to the rhythms of nature every 28 days or so.

Now comes a whole new array of products to tinker with our hormonal makeup.

Take Seasonale, Barr Pharmaceutical's heavily marketed and expensive (more than $650 a year) daily birth control pill that promises to cut down the customary monthly period to only four a year.

The Food and Drug Administration is likely to soon OK another daily oral contraceptive, Wyeth's Lybrel, that can stop periods altogether while taking the pill.

Doctors don't agree on whe-ther these period-sup-pression drugs are a good thing or not. Women aren't sure, either. But at least there are choices where before there were none.

Source:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/4274081.html