the history of my birth control
Last week, Time Magazine published an article about the political and emotional history of the birth control pill, which aimed to examine why – even after a 40 year longitude study with 46,000 women wherein scientists determined that women are much less likely to die prematurely from any cause, including cancers and heart disease - so many still won’t touch the thing. The article inspired me to write up a brief history of my own movement through birth control. As many of my readers know, my mother became an ob/gyn when I was in my teens, and so I had informational access – and just plain access – to all sorts of birth control. Here, then, is my timeline:
I started my sexually risky behavior at eleven. For those who read the book, you’ll remember that I encouraged attention from strange grown men on the streets, and subsequently wound up molested at twelve. I didn’t include everything in the book, though – in the interest of narrative drama – so you don’t know that when I was twelve, I spent time with the real “Liz” at her house and exchanged oral sex with a seventeen year old friend of her boyfriend’s for a few months. Still, between that year, another year when I grew too unappealing and insecure to attract boys, and two more years when I roped them in as though on a fishing pole, I managed to stay a virgin until I was sixteen. My first time was uneventful, if unpleasant, not because it didn’t feel good (it did), but because I was using the guy to get this Huge Life Event for a Girl over with. He used a condom. An upstanding guy, he didn’t even talk to me about it, just ripped one out of his back pants pocket and rolled it on – which in general over the years I’ve found to be the case. Boys (and men) have rarely asked me anything about protection, unless we’ve been together more than just a couple times. It is, just like it always has been, the unspoken responsibility of the girl to take care of that little issue of disease and pregnancy prevention (which explains all the teen mothers in class at the school where I teach).
Add in the loose girl issue – where girls won’t do anything that would get in the way of keeping this boy’s attention, where all she’s thinking about, if you can even call it thinking, is how to use this boy to fill her emptiness and sadness and loss – and you can see how few girls and boys will be “safe.” (As an aside, the whole notion of “safe sex” has always bugged me – just because there’s a hat on it doesn’t mean anyone feels safe emotionally).
So having a mother with this sort of expertise was particularly prohibitive for me. After losing my virginity, I wanted more and more sex. That’s not entirely true. Revision: after losing my virginity, wanting to take every experience with a boy as far as I could, I wanted to have sex with every boy I liked. A year later, I had my first “boyfriend” Heath. We used condoms – he made sure of it, smart boy. But it seemed time to ask my mother about going on the Pill. Most of you again know that by the time I got the pills from my mother Heath and I had broken up. But being on the Pill was life changing for me. I had been very educated by books and my mother, so I knew the Pill would do nothing to prevent diseases. But I knew that as long as I religiously took that little pink Pill every night, I’d not wind up pregnant, which was a much bigger fear for me back then than anything else.
My mother was sent samples by drug companies, and whatever samples she had, that’s what I’d get (it was either than or $25 a month through Planned Parenthood). At one point, when I was in college and dating Eli, I took a Pill that for the first night of every new cycle would make me throw up. Another one gave me zits. I asked my mother for something new, so on my next visit to Chicago, she hit me up with lidocaine and inserted six little tubes into my arm: Norplant. For the next two years I never got my period. I never worried about pregnancy. I sort of forgot about the whole notion of being a reproductive woman with cycles and premenstrual anger and blood that tied me to the movement of things. I was taking classes in school like “Women’s Spirituality” and “Postmodern Literature and Women.” Something felt off. So, I asked my mother to remove the tubes. I wanted to try something noninvasive, something that would allow my natural cycles and emotions. So I got fitted for a cervical cap. By now I was with Leif. I had already had crabs and HPV – because birth control is rarely foolproof (but I never had an abortion. I am the only woman I know, actually, who was spared this – abortions and molestations seem to be the two defining events of being a woman.) I figured we were solid enough in our relationship that I could take the time before sex to spurt some spermicidal cream into that cap and bear down to press it up inside me. Amazing, actually, how anyone can do that and retain the raw desire and fun of sex. That lasted about one month, and feeling there were no options, I went back on the Pill. By now, my mother told me, they’d created the lower-dose pills, and I shouldn’t have the same problems with nausea and acne. So, back on I went, and other than that brief break where I tried the rhythm method with Toby (and failed), and when I went off so I could get pregnant with my babies, I’ve been on BCPs ever since.
I am one of the few women I know in my circle of friends who is. Most of them report terrible side effects from the Pill – nausea, depression, weight gain. Others have said they don’t want to poison their bodies. Still others don’t like the idea of not being in touch with their natural cycles, where they will ovulate, build up lining, and have a menses each month. I have to admit: I can’t relate. Maybe I’m biased by my mother, but most every study has shown that the longer a woman stays on the Pill, the less likely she will wind up with ovarian or breast cancer, and less likely she’ll die from heart disease. My gynecologist (not my mother) told me, when I said I didn’t get my period on the Pill, there is simply no reason for a woman to have a period unless she’s trying to get pregnant. Listen, I’m as hippyish as the next girl. I’m an earth goddess too. But women didn’t live this long before now. Women weren’t supposed to do anything other than cook babies and get on their hands and knees to receive sperm for the next one. Things are different now (right? right?) I like the idea of limiting any tendencies I might have toward dying from cancer or heart disease. I also like not having to stick tampons up my hootie every month and suffer through cramps. I like…yes…being sexually free. And I like that as a girl who struggled in the ways I did with boys, I had this one way to protect myself from one more trauma: pregnancy and likely abortion. One more way because loose girls are notoriously bad at making sure we are protected – from pregnancy, diseases, and emotional despair.
What is your birth control history? Share it here.