Originally Posted by lurkette

And actually, stopping your period completely decreases the risk of ovarian cancer, so I'm not sure why your doctor would be concerned - basically, if you're not releasing eggs, there's no breakage of the sac around the egg in the ovary, and therefore no regeneration of cells to repair the break, and that regeneration is where much ovarian cancer starts as abnormally regenerated cells. They think that's why many developing countries where women are pregnant most of their lives have lower rates of ovarian cancer- they ovulate less. It's actually "unnatural" for women to have a period every month, evolutionarily speaking. Before the pill, women would likely be pregnant a lot more frequently than we are today, and would therefore have many fewer periods over the course of their lives.