Avoiding Pregnancy: Not as Easy as You May Think
And why abortion needs to remain accessible when birth control fails
**Nothing in this post should be construed as medical advice. I am not a healthcare practitioner, nor am I an authority on birth control methods. Please do your own research and don’t take anything I’ve stated here as fact. I am merely sharing my own personal experience.**
The blood finally came. My period was two days late. Given that my period is very rarely late (only 3 times in the last 2.5 years), those two days of waiting filled me with an undercurrent of anxiety. I knew there was no way I could be pregnant, as my husband and I didn’t have intercourse anywhere within my fertile window, but the anxiety is always hard to shake.
I never thought this would be my life, this chronic fear of pregnancy. Like an idealistic moron, I grew up thinking I wanted a lot of children (I think I just felt lonely and imagined a big family would make me happy). Not until the birth of my third child did I begin to think that maybe this was all a bit much for me. After my fourth, I couldn’t imagine bringing any more children into the world. My health and sanity were stretched to the limits.
Avoiding pregnancy is a physical and psychological burden that is hard to fully explain. It’s CHRONIC. Unless you live it, you don’t understand what a toll it takes on a person.
There is a common stereotype that women who experience unplanned pregnancies are merely irresponsible (somehow the men who impregnate them tend to escape the same accusation of irresponsibility). Because of the wide selection of birth control options, avoiding pregnancy should be super simple, right?! But as my own experience reveals, it’s way more complicated than that.
Birth control is a complex topic. There are many different forms, and each comes with its own set of drawbacks. It must be understood that there is no form of birth control that is 100% effective. The only way to completely ensure the avoidance of pregnancy is to completely avoid intercourse. And three decades of abstinence isn’t practical whatsoever. We are sexual beings. Sex for pleasure is hardwired into us and it’s never going away.
HORMONAL BIRTH CONTROL AND IUDS
Hormonal birth control (HBC), although it has been a very liberating tool for womankind in general, has come at a high cost. It can cause a wide variety of health problems (ironically, one frequently reported side effect is lowered libido). You can’t totally mess with the natural rhythm of your cycling hormones and not expect some repercussions. There is a plethora of information available about the negative effects of HBC. To be clear, I am not against HBC- I think it is a useful tool and that it should always remain accessible. But women need to be fully educated on it’s possible side-effects before consenting to taking it.
I once knew a woman whose doctor told her she would never be able to have children. At some point, she ended up getting pregnant and giving birth anyway. After discovering she COULD get pregnant, she went on hormonal birth control. And she got pregnant again- while on birth control. This story has two main takeaways: 1) Doctors don’t know everything and are frequently wrong, and 2) Hormonal birth control is not 100% effective.
There are other forms of birth control for women that are also problematic. I’ve heard one too many horror stories about copper IUDs from friends and strangers. I’ve even heard, from friends and strangers, how their doctors refused to remove their IUDs after they complained of health issues. That in itself is horrifying. Women’s health problems are frequently belittled and dismissed by health care providers.
I have chosen to not use any type of birth control that directly affects my body. I have had difficult-to-treat health problems for many years. I am incredibly sensitive, especially to my own hormones and their fluctuations. Medications of any kind typically cause me horrible digestive issues. And while HBC has been offered as a way to regulate and calm my cycle, it has been understood that it can only be a band-aid/temporary solution. And I know deep in my body that it would eventually make me worse.
BARRIER METHODS
My second pregnancy/child was the result of a broken condom during my peak fertility (it appears my pregnancy/miscarriage in 2017 was also the result of a defective condom). I know from personal experience that condoms aren’t 100% effective. My husband and I aren’t fans of condoms, and since it does kinda dampen the whole experience, it feels a little pointless sometimes.
I’ve never tried a female condom. It sounds even less sexy than a male condom. But the underlying issue remains- I wouldn’t trust its effectiveness, and therefore wouldn’t use it as a primary form of birth control.
FERTILITY AWARENESS METHOD
The Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), when done correctly, can be incredibly effective at preventing pregnancy. Since it doesn’t mess with your body’s chemistry, it can’t cause any negative side effects. You can only get pregnant for a short window of time during your cycle. So, if you learn your fertile signs, you can avoid intercourse during those days and avoid pregnancy. Theoretically, you can have all the unprotected intercourse you want the rest of your cycle without risking pregnancy.
I’ve been using variations of FAM for my entire marriage, but its effectiveness depends on you knowing how to recognize your fertile signs, and also, it kinda depends on you having a regular cycle.
My cycle fluctuates wildly, which is how my last two pregnancies happened. In each of those cases, I ended up ovulating earlier than usual, which unfortunately happened shortly after I had intercourse. My bleeding/spotting masked my fertile mucus, so I didn’t notice the initial fertile signs when I had intercourse.
This situation has happened several times (only resulting in pregnancy twice), and in most of those cases, I engaged in intercourse with my husband to help relieve a bad headache, as it can be effective in relieving the tension. I wasn’t even having sex because I was uncontrollably horny and irresponsible: I was in pain and seeking relief (it should be noted that pain can also cloud your judgment, so maybe my brain was too fucked up to realize we were having sex too close to ovulation*). Granted, masturbation would probably be just as effective for relieving the headache (I think it’s mostly the orgasm itself that relieves the tension), but masturbation often proves difficult when my head is in that much pain. So, while the ongoing joke is that many women get out of sex by complaining of a headache, my husband gets a little excited when I complain of a headache because it might mean we’re gonna have sex.
I’ve now become very strict regarding my intercourse cut-off date after bleeding. I won’t have intercourse after day six of my cycle until after I know I’ve ovulated. Sometimes this means we won’t have intercourse for well over a week. Which kinda sucks.
There are times we’ve used the pull-out method leading up to my fertile window, but it always makes me nervous. My husband is really good at retaining his semen, so we’ve never had an “accident”, but I still don’t trust it and rarely do it anymore.
*My husband is actively involved in learning my fertility, and any time I start coming on to him anywhere remotely close to my fertile window, he always asks me if I’m sure we’re safe to have intercourse.
STERILIZATION
There are always the surgical options. Vasectomy should be the obvious answer. My husband and I still don’t know how we feel about it yet. I am personally a bit uncomfortable with the concept, not entirely trusting that it is indeed safe in the long-term. Any medical or surgical intervention that prevents the body from completing its natural cycles makes me a bit wary. I am quite certain that I would never get a tubal ligation, for the same reasons. And given my freakishly high and unusual level of fertility (people with the kind of health issues I have generally struggle with infertility), I feel for certain that somehow it wouldn’t be completely effective and that I would be among that slim minority of women who still somehow get pregnant.
NON-INTERCOURSE SEX
Now of course, there are other forms of sexual activity that do not involve intercourse. But this has been problematic for me personally.
Until last year, I really struggled with sex. A big part of it was my body grappling with the religious conditioning of “purity culture”. Like many Christians, I grew up believing in the importance of remaining sexually pure until marriage. In many cases, masturbation was also seen as a sin. Any sexual activity that happened outside of a heterosexual marriage was considered sin. And so, when you’re young and awakening sexually, you learn to shut down all of your feelings and urges in order to not sin.
After years of this kind of somatic conditioning, you’ve effectively trained your body to treat sexuality as a threat. When you finally marry and have the green light to be sexual, that conditioning doesn’t magically clear up. Engaging sexually can become an extremely triggering experience in which your body perceives itself under attack. This can cause the fight or flight response to kick in (panic, rage), and even the freeze response (going weak, confusion, dissociation). Sex with the very person you love and trust becomes a bizarre traumatic experience.
For most of my marriage, I was sexually constipated. Sometimes sexual activity could trigger panic or disassociation. And it was always worse with sexual acts that weren’t intercourse. Me having to actually face my husband’s penis, both figuratively and literally, was (and sometimes still is) overwhelming. It took a lot of conscious work and processing for several years to get over most of these hang-ups. Only in the last year have I finally been able to experience sex without most of those weird feelings and anxiety.
And so, to avoid intercourse and focus on other sexual acts during my fertile window was often very difficult for me in the past. It was usually easier to just not engage with each other sexually during my fertile window, which was extra frustrating because that is when I am most aroused and interested in sex.
Thankfully, I’ve made a lot of progress in this area. I’ve become far more open and interested in engaging in these other sexual acts. This is now how my husband and I engage sexually during my fertile window. Although I am now more somatically open to these experiences, I am still physically limited much of the time. Because of my health issues, I may not have the energy, strength, or stamina to engage in these acts to completion. Missionary intercourse has always been the easiest go-to for me because I just lay there and my husband does all the work (thank you, Robert, lol). Anything else is going to take a level of stamina that I may not have.
Avoiding pregnancy is far more complicated than a lot of people realize. Birth control and sex are complex and play out differently for each individual due to unique body chemistry and personal lived experiences. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and it’s important to recognize the very real limits of each method and allow for grace and understanding for the inevitable mishaps which occur.
A woman can act in the most responsible fashion, doing all the right things to avoid pregnancy, and yet still wind up pregnant because of one simple error or even through no fault of her own.
Primary forms of birth control fail all the time. Even if we could miraculously get all women/couples using highly effective forms of birth control, you will still have a percentage of women who end up pregnant, and many of them will not be willing to continue with the pregnancy. There’s no escaping this reality.
This is why abortion needs to remain accessible and legal. Unplanned pregnancies happen all the time, even when birth control is being used. Whether women are being “irresponsible” or not, they should not be denied the right to abortion (and would you really want an “irresponsible” woman caring for a child she didn’t want?).
The reasons a woman chooses to prevent or terminate a pregnancy are many and always deeply personal. If women have the right to prevent pregnancy (and they certainly do), then they should have the right to end a pregnancy. Women have been preventing and ending pregnancies for thousands of years. Birth control and abortion are ancient practices which should be honored and protected.
Each person lives a complex life and deserves compassion and understanding. We need to let go of these ridiculous stereotypes and black & white ways of seeing the world. We need to bring humanity and nuance back to our conversations around sex, fertility, and reproductive decisions. The health of our future depends on it.
I experienced an unplanned pregnancy last year and made the difficult choice to abort. To read my story, click here.