I have been on the Pill for about 20 years.

Well before I went on the Pill I learned about sex, pregnancy, and birth control.  I lived with my mother until I was 11.  I do not remember ever not knowing about sex and reproduction.  My mother told me from a very young age how babies were made.  She also made it clear to me that if I ever got pregnant she would take me to get an abortion.

It was the 1980s when I began to understand what abortion was because Ronald Reagan was president and he appointed what he thought were anti-choice Supreme Court Justices.  I began talking back to my mother, “What if abortions are illegal?”  She responded that Canada wasn’t far away.

Though my mother was born in California and had lived in the state most of her life, she apparently didn’t know at the time that the president she so hated, Ronald Reagan, had, when he was governor of California, signed into law a state constitutional guarantee that abortions would “always” be legal in California.

Nonetheless, it was made clear to me that unplanned pregnancy was not a good thing, and that neither teen pregnancy nor abortions were pleasant.  I recall watching a PBS documentary about abortion that illustrated how difficult is the decision to have an abortion or not.  Pregnant was not something I wanted to be without the opportunity to fully plan it out.

When my sister was around sixteen she became sexually active.  I know this because it was news within the household.  By this time I lived with my sister, step-sister, step-brother, step-mother, and father.  My step-mother was most definitely in charge of all of us.  She took my sister to a clinic and got her supplied with various birth control methods.

My sister began using a diaphragm and had plenty of condoms, which she kept in her panty drawer.  My step-sister and I, who are the same age, four years younger than my sister, more than once raided my sister’s drawer, and grabbed some condoms.  We sometimes blew them up into balloons.  One time we showed them to the very dorky guy who lived on our block who gave my sister rides to school every morning.  It was hilarious.  Or at least we thought so at the time; my step-sister and I laughed like goofy pre-teens and the neighbor was embarrassed as hell.

When my step-sister and I were fourteen she became sexually active.  I became counselor to a dumb sexually active teen.  She was too afraid to utter the word, “pregnant.”  Instead, she asked me numerous times, “Do you think I am?” and “What if I am?” and “What will I do if I am?”

To which I was supposed to respond, “No, of course not,” “You’re not,” and “You don’t have to think about that, because you’re not,” respectively.  All this worry because my step-sister couldn’t be bothered to use condoms.

And neither could I when I lost my virginity two years later.  I was worried that I could be pregnant for a very short time, but it was long enough.  Not something I wanted to repeat.

When I was seventeen I began chasing a boy, Henry, whom I wanted to make my boyfriend.  Before we even kissed, I took myself to Planned Parenthood in Pasadena and went on the Pill.  By this time I lived by myself and nowhere near my parents, from whom I had not been emancipated.  No matter–the great thing about preventing pregnancy in California (and all other enlightened states) is that a child doesn’t need her parent’s consent.

Planned Parenthood didn’t just hand 17-year-old me a pack of birth control pills and send me on my way.  Despite my vast experience with condom inflation and awareness of what a diaphragm was, I was counseled on all the various ways I could both have sex and not conceive.  I settled on the Pill for its ease of use, and because I naively thought Henry and I would be monogamous.  (Keep in mind that this guy had no clue of my plans to “make” him have a relationship with me).

I took lots of pamphlets home and devoured them.  I knew all I could (pre-internet, of course) about sexually transmitted diseases (now dubbed the more PC “sexually transmitted infections”–not so much stigma with an infection as with a disease) and all forms of birth control.  I’d heard too many condom-breakage stories to settle for just condoms, and the barrier methods available to women at the time, the cervical cap, IUD.  At the time IUDs were only available to women who had had at least one pregnancy.

When I first went on the Pill there were some adjustments that had to be made.  Each brand and type of Pill has different levels of hormones.  At the time Planned Parenthood started all first-timers on the same type of Pill and then sent us home with a list of potential side effects.  Should any of the severe ones occur, we were to return to Planned Parenthood, where our Pill choice would be reevaluated.

The first Pill I went on gave me horrible headaches.  After changing to the next option on the list of Pill types provided by Planned Parenthood, I was fine.  Since then I’ve changed the kind of pill I was on for various reasons–because I was anemic, to clear up my skin, to regulate my periods, etc.–but never for ill effects.

More to come ….

I swear.  True Story.

["The Pill (Part 2)"]

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