Should nuns go on the pill? A study published in the Lancet suggests that all younger ones should; and the reason has nothing to do with contraception. In fact the most interesting thing is that there seems to be no reason in Catholic dogma why they should not.

It has been known for centuries that nuns suffer disproportionately from ovarian and uterine cancer and assumed for as long that this must have something to do with their celibate lives. Modern studies of American nuns show that they have higher rates of reproductive cancer than the general population, and this disproportion rises as they grow older.

The contraceptive pill would help protect them against this fate. It is possible to formulate it so that menstruation is almost entirely suppressed; repeated periods make reproductive cancers much more likely because they increase the number of cell divisions.

The Lancet study quotes computer models suggesting that modern American women, who have children late, are hundreds of times more likely to suffer from breast and uterine cancer than paleolithic hunter-gatherers who had children early and often (though of course now childbirth is much safer and life expectancy has increased somewhat).

After the age of 70, a nun is twice as likely to die of breast cancer as a normally sexually active woman; uterine and ovarian cancers don't show such dramatic figures but they still climb among the old. And nuns tend generally to live longer than the rest of the population.

So putting younger nuns on the pill would save a considerable number of them from a peculiarly horrible form of death. It would not be contrary to Catholic teaching, which holds that the contraceptive pill can be licitly taken for non-contraceptive purposes.

One thing the figures show is that American nuns by and large do stick to their vows. This can be contrasted with the implication drawn from the high Aids rate in the US priesthood, which has been reported as four times the rate for the general population. They also have a well-deserved reputation for independence of mind. So will they follow this medical advice? It will be interesting to see. Certainly there's no obvious spiritual reason for running an increased risk of cancer. The only reason I can imagine for a nun to stay off the pill is a combination of institutional inertia with old-fashioned misogyny.