According to medical experts catholic nuns should be given the pill to help reduce the risk of cancer, even though it’s against church rules.
Next time you see a nun take the little white Eucharist in church, it could be something a lot less holy than the Body of Christ. According to experts Dr Kara Britt and Professor Roger Short of the University of Melbourne, taking the pill may help to protect nuns from breast, ovarian and womb cancer, as nuns are one of the groups most at risk of contracting the deadly disease.
This is because cancer resulting in death is known to be much greater among ‘nulliparous’ women i.e. those who give birth much later in life or not at all.
However, there’s just one problem. “The Catholic church condemns all forms of contraception, as outlined by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae in 1968,” the researchers wrote, in a comment published in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal the Lancet. But there may still be a chance the nuns can get the pill after all, as the same document also says the church does not forbid medicines with contraceptive effects if that medicine can cure disease.
“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 researchers wrote.
With nearly 95,000 Catholic nuns in the world today, a lot of them could side step cancer with just one little pill as the risks drop by 50-60 per cent for women who do take it, say the experts.
