Many difficult decisions in life can be evaluated effectively and fairly using a logical rubric of simple priorities.  Let’s say you made a pinky promise over a miniature tea set to attend the first, and perhaps last, communion of a little girl suffering from leukemia, but at the last minute, a critical and absolutely unavoidable deadline crops up at work.  How can one make the right choice and still feel personally vindicated? 

It all depends on where you place your priorities and whether, on your internal scale of importance, the need to increase sales enough to pay off your student loans and buy a gram of coke outweighs the basic human virtues of empathy, honesty and responsibility.  You have to look deep within yourself and act consistently with the inherent tendencies of your very soul.  If not, you risk a level of cognitive dissonance between the perceived importance of your ethical character and the demonstrated worthlessness of your belief system which may well consume your sense of self with the fire of a thousand suns and set the burnt-out husk of your former self adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and self-doubt.

Despite the obvious moral conflict and significant emotional risk, you’d ultimately have to go into work since the need for increased productivity in the private sector is greater than the selfish desires of one cancer ward prima donna. The needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.  In any case, the little girl’s disappointment and resentment is bound to die within her in a very short time.

But it’s not always so obvious. In today’s murky moral waters, the breakdown of logical comparison and selection of alternatives can lead to mind-bending absurdities – such as law school and low-carb dieting. However, foremost among the priority-impaired are the women who are sexually active but go on and off oral contraceptives because they think it makes them fat.  In a word: fatuous.

A woman who goes off birth control pills solely due to weight concerns is a complete and utter moron for two incontrovertible reasons.  For you gape-mouthed feminists,everybody already understands that there are multiple reasons that a woman may go off birth control, some of them important and valid.  This is not for them, so don't go there.

For starters, consider a relatively simple comparison: 10 pounds of fat versus 25-35 pounds of fetus.  In fact, weight gain during pregnancy could be even greater, since this estimate is only an ideal range of “optimal” weight gain for the “average” woman, according to WebMD.  Think of the whiny little leukemia girl mentioned above and your über-important job assignment.  Here, too, one must evaluate competing possibilities and select the one which is most consistent with his personal values.  Nobody here wants a kid.  Kids smell bad and cost money which would be better spent on spring break road trips, ramen noodles and deliciously cheap beer.  Nobody here wants to get fat, either; hence the newly introduced diet-coke, cigarette and crack salad at Cosi. However, a potential weight gain of 10 or 15 pounds of (some would say) “cush’n for the pushin’” is absolutely nothing when compared to 25 or even 35 pounds of parasitic, spine-bending, foot-exploding, marriage-inducing fetus.  Ten pounds you might lose in a month.  A kid could last 18 years.  Get over it.

Secondly, there is not one shred of solid evidence, scientific or otherwise, that oral contraceptives contribute to weight gain.  True, earlier versions of the pill were linked with greater water retention, but this was and still is relatively rare.  Maximum reported weight gain in various studies available on Medline was around 10% of total weight, but these figures are wholly unreliable, since each study gathers info over a different span of time and only three used a control group receiving a placebo.

In January of this year, a review of all the available scientific literature published in The Cochrane Library (“Combination contraceptives: effects on weight”, by MF Gallo et al.) concluded that the overall reporting quality of previous studies was “poor” and that no causal relationship between contraceptive use and weight gain has ever been established.  Results vary widely depending on the sample size and the contraceptive drug tested, but only in three studies was weight gain, if there was any, ever over two kg (about seven pounds).  However, none of these three studies incorporated a control group, and the only three that did reported no significant weight gain among participants, as did the vast majority of studies.  In some studies, subjects even lost weight after starting birth control.

Certain studies actually targeted the perceived weight gain phenomenon itself.  One such study, published in 2000 in the Journal of Family Planning, conducted research within focus groups of women of different ages.  The study concluded that women “tended to overestimate the risks and underestimate the effectiveness of hormonal contraceptives.” Additionally, the study cited a resistance among women to “interfere with their bleeding patterns and weight.”  An article in Family Health International even went so far as to remark that many women could benefit from counseling about typical weight gain over time.

Women have the right to have control over and (theoretically) be comfortable with their bodies.  That said, risking an unwanted pregnancy for the sake of a few (imagined) beauty pounds is an act worthy of Paris Hilton’s Down Syndrome-afflicted doppelganger.  For everybody’s sake, take the pills and have a hamburger.