Read America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation Online

Authors: Elaine Tyler May

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Modern, #Social History, #Social Science, #Abortion & Birth Control

America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (18 page)

BOOK: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
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Katie M’s path to the pill was even more fraught. She “never worked up the nerve to visit the gynecologist and ask them, or anyone else, about birth control. In fact, I was the perfect statistic—a product of an abstinence-only sex/health education that only led me to withhold sexual activity slightly longer than average and prevented me from using birth control because that would imply I had been
planning
on having sex, heaven forbid.” So she and her boyfriend began having unpro- tected sex. “I hated myself so much. I hated myself for not speaking up about what I knew was irresponsible sexual behav- ior.” When she and her partner decided to use condoms, that too was an ordeal. “Having both been virgins and both com- pletely embarrassed about sex (that we denied we were having), we spent about six seconds furtively looking at the condom display in Wal-Mart before randomly picking a package. Even though I knew the proper way to put a condom on thanks to the Internet, I was too paralyzed by shame and guilt about having sex in the first place (an obvious sign I shouldn’t have gone that far since I wasn’t personally comfortable with it) to

properly apply it. I’m pretty sure we bought the wrong size as well. Needless to say, the condom broke just as he came inside of me for the first time. I ended up with a strangely soul- numbing yet panicky pregnancy scare and that was probably the beginning of the end of my first relationship.”

Katie faced her own guilt as well as parental disapproval. “The crazy thing is that I never even considered the pill. Be- tween my parents, my religious upbringing, and poor sexual education I was under the impression that girls that used the pill were sluts. Even if I had wondered about getting birth con- trol, I felt I couldn’t visit a gynecologist because my mother would somehow find out I had been having sex and lose all trust in me. Or be really disappointed.” She could not even turn to her college health center, or to her friends. “There was no way I could talk to my school nurse, since I attended a Christian college. I suspected that I would probably be investi- gated and expelled or ‘campused’ if someone found out. I couldn’t bear the thought of my friends finding out either. I was so afraid of losing their respect and becoming ‘dirty’ in their eyes that I deliberately avoided looking suspicious.” Fi- nally, in her junior year, she attended a free seminar on women’s health that transformed her attitudes about sex and birth control. “I researched the various types of birth control and realized how many options I had. As my sexual education expanded, I stumbled into feminism and began to realize just how many choices the pill affords me.” Taking control of her sexuality and fertility led her to feminism—rather than the other way around. “I would never stay with a man who would presume to dictate what I did with my body and sexual health.

I also realized just how stupidly lucky I had been that I had never become pregnant after having unprotected sex for over a year. . . . I ended my college career older, wiser, and much bet- ter off emotionally.”
23

Katie M was one of several Internet respondents who sought help from health professionals when they felt unable to turn to family or friends. Jenny B did the same. She began tak- ing the pill at age fifteen. In her small town in north Florida, “everyone was nominally to extremely religious and both sex and birth control were considered to be an ‘after-marriage- only’ option.” But her town also had a high teen pregnancy rate. Knowing that Jenny’s family would disapprove, a nurse at the medical office where she worked gave her the pills for free. “I had to keep them hidden from my parents.”
24

Like Jenny B, nearly half of the Internet respondents began taking the pill as young teenagers. The most common age was sixteen, but some were younger. The youngest was eleven when she first took the pill to control heavy bleeding. Although there is no available data for how many first-generation pill takers were unmarried when they first took the pill, or the age at which they began, young single women of the 1960s faced legal barriers, medical hostility, parental disapproval, and their own ethical qualms. Today’s teens are less likely to encounter those inhibiting factors. Some of the respondents first took the pill to alleviate severe menstrual symptoms and discovered its contraceptive benefits soon after they began taking it.

A few young women acknowledged that the pill had a neg- ative effect on their sexual behavior. Kristy H confessed, “The

pill became an easy way out for me to engage in promiscuous sexual activity, and a form of abuse. I would take it straight through for months at a time so as to miss my period and be able to have sex ‘like a man.’ Now that I’m off of it completely, I feel more in control.”
25
Melissa B also felt that the pill led her down a path to irresponsible sex and only later to a process of growth and responsibility. She began taking the pill at age fif- teen, and remembers “the power this gave me over my sexual- ity and the liberty I felt to be a sexual human being.” But she also saw the pill “as a ‘free card’ to sexual activity. . . . All the same, the pill was still there as a silent partner, as my percep- tions of myself as a sexual being continued to grow and be challenged into adulthood.”
26

These accounts make it clear that in spite of feminism and the sexual revolution, some women experience the same guilt, shame, and parental disapproval that faced their mothers’ gen- eration. For some of them, the pill was part of a path not only to responsible contraception, but also to new ideas about sex, greater personal empowerment, and feminist identity. Other young women had no need to break away from parental atti- tudes because their parents were supportive and encouraging. When Carrie R was heading off to college, her father, a family physician, urged her to go on the pill. “It was his opinion that it was much simpler to start on the pill then, before I was sex- ually active, than to wait until after I needed contraception. . . . It was rather a weird conversation to have with my Dad, me being the really innocent sixteen-year-old homeschooled girl that I was. However, as soon as I got to university I went down to the health clinic and got a prescription.”
27

Many of the young women who had the support of their parents were raised by feminist mothers. Linda L was one such woman. “I have been a feminist since I was ten years old, and the magazines I would read growing up (
Seventeen
,
YM
,
Sassy
, etc.) always touted birth control as a positive thing. When I started dating, my mother told me to ‘use protection.’ I’m ex- tremely grateful for our feminist foremothers who made it pos- sible for us to have access to birth control without there being too much of a stigma.”
28
Erika B’s mother, an ob/gyn nurse, got her Norplant when she was fifteen, because she felt it was more reliable and long term for a teenager.
29
Carolyn P began taking the pill at age sixteen. “After [I told] my Mom I was in- terested in being sexually active with my boyfriend at the time, she insisted I get on the pill.”
30
Anita K reported, “When it comes to ethics or morals I have never thought twice about using birth control. My grandmother had my mother when she was barely sixteen and was forced into a miserable marriage right before my mother was born, so I have grown up with strong women telling me to make my own choices about my body. In high school, my mom was the mom who took my friends to the clinic to get birth control, since they were scared of their own mothers’ reactions to their sexuality.”
31

Clearly, there is a wide range of attitudes toward sex and contraception in the generations since the pill became avail- able. There is also a wide range of experiences with side effects. In spite of the vast improvements in oral contraceptives over the last half century and the wide array of hormonal contra- ceptives now available, many young women on the pill today suffer the same symptoms that plagued their mothers’ genera-

tion. Julie D expressed the sentiments of many when she said that the pill was “the most miserable thing I’ve ever put into my body.”
32

Some described severe psychological and emotional effects. Jane B took the once-a-month injection, and each time, “two days later I was an absolute emotional wreck. Paranoia, de- pression, anger, it was horrible.” Carol O said the pill turned her into “a raving lunatic.” Melissa G suffered severe nausea and vomiting, so she tried the low-dose pill but “bled con- stantly the entire time, and often woke up with headaches that pain killers would not relieve.”
33
Kristol R reported that the pill caused a friend of hers to be so “depressed and list- less” that it took two years away from her life. For Kristol R, however, the pill was a blessing: “I haven’t told her this, but while the pill might have taken two years of her life, the pill gave me my life.”
34

Side effects did not trouble every woman taking the pill. In fact, some reported taking it for its noncontraceptive benefits. Several respondents took the pill because it provides control over inconvenient bodily functions, particularly menstruation. Some went on the pill to eliminate their periods altogether. Initially, manufacturers of the oral contraceptives presumed that women would object to a pill that eliminated the monthly period. But some women welcome this effect.
35
They skip the “placebo pills” of the fourth week in the pill packet so they can avoid having a fake period. Robyn E “found the pill to be in- valuable. I actually take it all the time; I know that the manu- facturers say that you should leave the seven-day gap, but I can’t see any reason to because any ‘period’ you get is just

withdrawal bleeding anyway. . . . I don’t feel any sort of earthy link with my cycle; to be honest I’d be perfectly happy if it just went away. Then again, I don’t intend to have children.”
36

Mary M, a twenty-three-year-old engineer, raved about the pill: “More than contraception, it is a way to control my period. . . . It has so many other fantastic side effects! . . . I can have my period whenever I want. If I don’t want to have my period ever again, I don’t have to. If I want to take a beach va- cation or have sex with my boyfriend, I can. I am in control of my body.”
37
Linda O appreciated other side effects. On the pill since age seventeen, she “really can’t say enough good things about it. It cleared up most of my acne, made my breasts big- ger, and lessened my menstrual cramps. What’s not to love?”
38
Letty C found the pill to be “incredibly liberating. I studied abroad in college and the pill made it possible for me to skip my periods entirely during my travel abroad . . . which was a huge benefit, and since then I have used the sneaky period- skip method to avoid having a period on a number of other highly inconvenient occasions (during final exams, vacations,

on my birthday, etc.).”
39

Jane D had more professional reasons for wanted to control her cycle. As a woman in the military, she began taking the pill shortly after joining the Army and used it for nine years to reg- ulate her period. She faced situations that would have been un- thinkable for women of her mother’s generation. “Before the pill, I never knew when my period would come. I didn’t know how long it would be, or how heavy. My job in the military re- quired me to work in remote areas. . . . We lived in tents, used port-a-johns, and got showers every three days or once a week,

depending on our resources. We would do this for weeks or months. This was our job. . . . I needed to know when my pe- riods would come and what they would be like. I didn’t want to bleed through my clothes. There were very few women in my field and I knew that I would be looked at as an example of what all women in the military would be like. I would not be viewed as an individual. The pill was invaluable.”
40
As Jane D’s experience demonstrates, new opportunities that opened up for women led to unanticipated benefits of the pill.

Pharmaceutical companies realized that some women took the pill for its beneficial side effects, rather than primarily for contraception. In 2009, Bayer Health Care Pharmaceuticals advertised the noncontraceptive benefits of Yaz, the most pop- ular birth control pill in the United States. Because Yaz was approved only as an oral contraceptive, the FDA forced Bayer to launch a $20 million advertising campaign to counter its previous claims that Yaz would cure acne or premenstrual symptoms. The FDA ruled that the original ads were mislead- ing and encouraged women to take the drug for purposes other than contraception. Nevertheless, some women continued to take the pill for its noncontraceptive benefits.
41

Another unexpected effect of the pill was its contribution to increasing openness regarding matters of sex, reproduction, and contraception. Open communication enhanced women’s relationships with the men in their lives, their female friends, and their health care providers. In the pill’s early years, it con- tributed to greater communication between doctors and their female patients. As the sexual revolution and the feminist movement led to greater openness in discussions about sex,

publicly as well as privately, the pill was central to those con- versations. Today that trend continues.

For some young women, the pill has become a central part of their daily routine and a source of bonding with their female friends, even if their relationships with men do not last. Twenty- three-year-old Lauren C reported, “The pill and I are still to- gether, though my high school boyfriend and I are not. . . . My best friend [and I] had been taking it for months already, and we dutifully popped our BB-size tablets at 10 every night. Some- times it amazes me that I’ve been taking a drug every day for over five years. That’s 1,680 pills, sixty trips to the pharmacy, twenty phone calls to my doctor for refills, and—happily—no pregnancies.”
42
Renae J echoed that theme: “While the relation- ship that brought the pill into my life ended nearly two years ago, my partnership with the pill is stronger than ever. Every morning, the alarm on my cell phone goes off at 10:03, and I reach for the little turquoise packet on my nightstand.”
43

BOOK: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
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