From Birth Control to Menstrual Control: The Launch of the Extended Oral Contraceptive, "Seasonale"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In September 2003 in a move much debated and discussed in the North American media Barr Laboratories received U.S. FDA approval to release Seasonable on to the prescription drug market. Seasonable is a repackaging of low-dose birth control pills in an extended regimen consisting of 84 straight days of use instead of the previously prescribed 21 days followed by a seven day pill-free interval. Its release gave formal medical approval to the practice of long-term menstrual suppression achieved through continuous birth control pill use--much longer than 84 days in some cases--which has been quietly carried out by thousands of women for a variety of reasons for at least the last two decades. Some of the public discourse surrounding this event has been fuelled by the publication of a book in 1999 by Brazilian gynecologist Dr. Elsimar Coutinho and population scientist Dr. Sheldon Segal entitled Is Menstruation Obsolete? Coutinho and Segals main thesis is that menstruation is useless and harmful to women their families and to society. He argues that menstruation is an evolutionary anomaly which has become an inconvenience and a hassle for women and suggests that those who do not agree with him are misguided and out of date. (excerpt)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".