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Authors: Laura Eldridge
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were always able to buy secrecy around their reproductive mishaps. Besides providing a cogent overview of everything from fertility awareness to female condoms, she analyzes why birth control is such a sticky wicket. Is the Pill liberating for women—or dangerous? Are condoms the least effective form of birth control—or the best, given that they also prevent the spread of STIs? Eldridge stays away from either/or prescriptions, concluding, “If you aren’t happy with your birth control, there is no reason not to try another method.” And with this book, you can figure out how to best do that, armed with health information and political context.
I realized after reading In Our Control that there was a lot I didn’t know. We have more alternatives than I was aware of, for instance, and birth control options that may be annoying in some ways are powerful in others. Most of all, I learned that contraception does not have to be a damper on your sex life. With Eldridge’s astute work in hand, I might just get my head out of the sand and face the facts of life.
Introduction
Three years ago, at twenty-seven, I ended my long-term relationship with the Pill. I had used it off and on for about nine years. Things hadn’t been good for a long time, and I had desperately been looking for a way to leave, but felt trapped. It turned out the answer I’d been looking for was there all along.
I first went on the Pill when I was eighteen. I had been in a relationship for almost a year and was thinking about having sex. Of course I planned to use condoms as well, but I was heading off to college in New York City in the fall and didn’t want to jeopardize my future in any way. A good child of the 1990s, I had sat through tons of sexual education classes. They all conveyed the same message: birth control pills were the way to go. I also knew what my friends were saying, what the girls who had become sexually active before me whispered over French fries in the cafeteria of my small Utah Catholic high school. The only way to be really safe, pregnancy-wise, was to take matters into your own hands.
Being eighteen, I didn’t march up to the family doctor and ask for the Pill, although thanks to good marketing on the part of pill makers, I probably could have. I could have feigned bad periods or claimed that I wanted to erase the blemishes that had danced farther and farther down my forehead toward my eyebrows as puberty progressed. But I didn’t. Instead, I did what savvy young people in the Salt Lake Valley did when they were in my situation: I went to the small Planned Parenthood located about two blocks from my high school.
Kids went there because it was cheap, and more importantly, because of its precious “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I knew girls too afraid to ask for pelvic exams who went there out of concern for basic health, and of course I knew those who went for pregnancy tests and abortions. I was pretty nervous on that desert-hot July day when I parked my beat-up red car next to the clinic and walked furtively into the small lobby, praying that none of my friends’ parents would see me. I read over a brochure that listed the differentcontraceptive methods next to their respective efficacy rates as I sat and waited for my consultation, but in truth I had decided what I wanted long before I darkened the clinic doors. A kind, soft-spoken staff doctor gave me my first pelvic exam and wrote me a prescription for a popular tricyclic pill.
The first few weeks I was on the Pill, not much happened. My breasts swelled up and became painful, and I found that though I hadn’t really had PMS before, I was suddenly inconsolable for two or three days before a bleed. Otherwise, I was pretty happy.
I went off to school in the fall and dropped the Pill. I rarely saw my boyfriend and remembering to take it was too much of a pain. I would go back on periodically over the next six or seven years, always struggling to take it
I realized after reading In Our Control that there was a lot I didn’t know. We have more alternatives than I was aware of, for instance, and birth control options that may be annoying in some ways are powerful in others. Most of all, I learned that contraception does not have to be a damper on your sex life. With Eldridge’s astute work in hand, I might just get my head out of the sand and face the facts of life.
Introduction
Three years ago, at twenty-seven, I ended my long-term relationship with the Pill. I had used it off and on for about nine years. Things hadn’t been good for a long time, and I had desperately been looking for a way to leave, but felt trapped. It turned out the answer I’d been looking for was there all along.
I first went on the Pill when I was eighteen. I had been in a relationship for almost a year and was thinking about having sex. Of course I planned to use condoms as well, but I was heading off to college in New York City in the fall and didn’t want to jeopardize my future in any way. A good child of the 1990s, I had sat through tons of sexual education classes. They all conveyed the same message: birth control pills were the way to go. I also knew what my friends were saying, what the girls who had become sexually active before me whispered over French fries in the cafeteria of my small Utah Catholic high school. The only way to be really safe, pregnancy-wise, was to take matters into your own hands.
Being eighteen, I didn’t march up to the family doctor and ask for the Pill, although thanks to good marketing on the part of pill makers, I probably could have. I could have feigned bad periods or claimed that I wanted to erase the blemishes that had danced farther and farther down my forehead toward my eyebrows as puberty progressed. But I didn’t. Instead, I did what savvy young people in the Salt Lake Valley did when they were in my situation: I went to the small Planned Parenthood located about two blocks from my high school.
Kids went there because it was cheap, and more importantly, because of its precious “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I knew girls too afraid to ask for pelvic exams who went there out of concern for basic health, and of course I knew those who went for pregnancy tests and abortions. I was pretty nervous on that desert-hot July day when I parked my beat-up red car next to the clinic and walked furtively into the small lobby, praying that none of my friends’ parents would see me. I read over a brochure that listed the differentcontraceptive methods next to their respective efficacy rates as I sat and waited for my consultation, but in truth I had decided what I wanted long before I darkened the clinic doors. A kind, soft-spoken staff doctor gave me my first pelvic exam and wrote me a prescription for a popular tricyclic pill.
The first few weeks I was on the Pill, not much happened. My breasts swelled up and became painful, and I found that though I hadn’t really had PMS before, I was suddenly inconsolable for two or three days before a bleed. Otherwise, I was pretty happy.
I went off to school in the fall and dropped the Pill. I rarely saw my boyfriend and remembering to take it was too much of a pain. I would go back on periodically over the next six or seven years, always struggling to take it
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