FDA Approves 'No-Period' Contraceptive Pill

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"There were other products, such as the long-acting progestin, Depo-Provera, that was given by injection," said Dr. Michael Petriella, vice chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Hackensack University Medical Center, in Hackensack, N.J. "Women who were using that for contraception wouldn't get their period at all while on that product."

And for years, "some physicians have been allowing some women to take the Pill off-label -- allowing them to take two packages continuously, for example," Petriella said.

Another expert noted that the "period" women get while on conventional birth-control pills isn't connected to a natural cycle of egg production, anyway.

"It's not a natural period. It's an artificially induced period that happens because she stops taking the hormones for seven days. So, she gets some vaginal bleeding," explained Dr. Camelia Davtyan, an internist specializing in women's health and an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In fact, a no-period pill like Lybrel could have been a contraceptive norm for women from the get-go, Davtyan said. However, the doctors and pharmaceutical companies who developed the birth-control pill back in the 1960s assumed that women would want a regimen that mimicked the monthly cycle.

"I guess they were trying to make it seem as 'real' as possible and cause as little change as possible in a woman's life," Davtyan said.

But times have changed, and newer contraceptive products such as Seasonale -- a contraceptive pill that cuts the number of periods to just four a year -- have already been readily embraced by some American women over the past decade.

Davtyan said she has recently noticed a big shift in her patients' attitudes toward their period.

"They want convenience, and they tell me that they'd just rather not have the bleeding altogether so that they don't have any limitations with sports, with having to use pads, tampons," she said. "And the younger the woman, the more likely that she will want her periods stopped. It's very possible that this will be the wave of the future."