Nothing short of a total firestorm has arisen from the news that the Susan G. Komen Foundation is cutting their funding to Planned Parenthood. Uber-conservatives have been acting like it's their very own New Year's Eve, turning the Susan G. Komen Facebook page into their celebratory HQ. And anyone who cares at all about women's well-being has had a perpetual scowl painted across their face for the past 48 hours. But I'm here to tell you that those of us here on the sane side of the road mustn't mourn any longer, because there's a sweet upshot to all of this! No, really.

Donors who were totally P.O.'ed by the Komen decision have donated $650+K to Planned Parenthood over the past day or so, which is nearly enough to replace last year's Komen funding, say PP execs. Amaaaaaazing! 

Bummed out about the birth control recall? Worried about the safety and effectiveness of your pill? Welcome to the I-hate-dealing-with-birth-control club. There were plenty of reasons not to love the pill even before this latest debacle. There's the hormones, the puffiness, the mood swings, the cancer risk, the forgetting to take it. Ugh!

It's enough to make you just want to give up on birth control altogether -- almost. Except that there's that whole getting pregnant thing. Which most of us don't want to do every nine months. But here's a radical idea: How's about the guys worry about the birth control a little? Time for us to remind the men of the world about what a huge favor they'd do us if they'd just get a freakin' vasectomy.

Those of you out there who are on the Pill might want to "have a headache" tonight. In fact, I sincerely hope you've been a little too busy for action in the sack a lot of late, not that it's any of my business. Because, if your birth control pill happens to have been among the one million Pfizer has just announced it would recall, it might not have kept you from getting pregnant unintentionally.

Yes, today brings what must be positively terrifying news for a lot of women: Pfizer is recalling one million blister packs of birth control pills because a packaging error might mean women who are taking them don't get the proper dosage and are at a significantly higher risk for an unintended pregnancy.

Did the moment when we women can throw away our birth control pills, diaphragms, sponges, IUDs, and other contraceptive devices with confidence just get closer? Will we soon be able to rely on a simple zap to prevent us from getting pregnant? And will the responsibility for contraception finally fall not to us, but more than ever to our male partners? (Here's hoping!)

Researchers at the University of North Carolina think they may have come with a new "promising candidate" for male contraception: zapping testicles with a dose of ultrasound in order to halt the production of sperm, or at least reduce it to "sub-fertile" levels. It works on rats, the BBC reports, and they're hoping to perfect it for use in humans.

Most of us ladies at some point have suffered from excruciatingly painful periods (or, in docs' and researchers' lingo, dysmenorrhea). If you've ever gone to your OB/GYN for help, you've probably heard him or her sing the praises of what they consider the #1 "cure" for this problem: The birth control pill. Docs have prescribed it for years off-label as a fix for cramps and heavy bleeding.

Now, there's a new study confirming this long-held belief. The findings, which are published in the journal Human Reproduction, show that women who used a combo estrogen-progestin pill (which is pretty much every mainstream pill these days) suffered less severe pain than women who did not use it. That's fabulous and all, but no one's talking about WHY this is the case?? And that's the most important part!

Surprise, surprise! The former head of the FDA, David Kessler, has said that Bayer, the company that manufactures creeptastic birth control pills Yasmin and Yaz, reportedly withheld company research involving increased reports of blood clots in its pills' users ... all the way back in 2004. The drug company "presented a selective view of the data, and that presentation obscured the potential risks associated with Yasmin."

It's no wonder the company is now facing more than 10,000 lawsuits, which claim Bayer didn't warn patients of the health risks of the Yasmin and Yaz birth control pills. They're also in trouble for marketing the drug for unapproved uses, like PMS and acne.

While troubling, it's not like we didn't already know these drugs present a higher risk ... 

Every so often a study comes out showing how certain birth control pills are bad news for us ladies. Depending on your own hormonal "baseline" and lifestyle, some forms can lead to gallstones, blood clots/strokes, totally MIA libido, etc. You'd think it couldn't get any worse. Well, it just did! New research has come out stating that the pill is contributing to higher rates of prostate cancer in men. Agh! WTH!?

The researchers say it has to do with the pill's form of estrogen, ethinyl estradiol, which women taking the drug release as an xenoestrogen (AKA Frankenstein version of estrogen) through our, uh, waste. In turn, the phony estrogen ends up in our water and food supply. Eeeugh. Totally disturbing news, but at the same time ... the solution here has nothing to do with women taking little pink pills. 

A few months back, the FDA said they were investigating the matter of those dangerous, "next generation" birth control pills that both Canadian and British studies have shown to be associated with an extremely elevated risk of blood clots. This week, the U.S. verdict came in!

The FDA's study reviewed the medical history of more than 800,000 American women who had taken various forms of birth control from 2001 to 2007. Women on Bayer's Yasmin, Johnson & Johnson's Ortho Evra patch, and Merck's Nuvaring were among those with the highest instances of blood clots. And on average, women taking Bayer's popular Yaz had a 75 PERCENT greater chance of experiencing a blood clot than women on older forms of the Pill. Wow. Now, we have FDA-approved proof that these pills are officially dangerous. And yet ... now what? Crickets?