Thursday, November 3, 2011

There's no excuse for unintended pregnancy! ...Or is there?


If you're an Abortioneer, an aficionado of public health journals, or if you've watched TV or read a women's magazine recently, you know that IUDs are all the rage. We're moving away from the horror stories of the Dalkon Shield, away from myths like "IUDs are for women who have already had a kid and who only have one partner," and moving toward the realm where IUDs are commonplace, the everywoman's contraception. The thing is, though, I fear that we're also moving toward the place where if a woman gets pregnant, it's her own fault...OK, sure, we're already in that place, as far as the majority of misogynists are concerned, but the place I don't want to be is where the progressive, woman-centered, feminist reproductive health professionals start to believe it.

As I mentioned in my last post, IUDs are still far from accessible and affordable, but we seem to be moving in that direction, slowly but surely. I can see a generation of women who have a long-term, reversible, ultra-effective method of preventing pregnancy. But I can also see feedback such as, "Well, she deserves to be pregnant--she insisted on continuing to take pills when she could have been more protected by an IUD," "*sigh* I recommended an IUD, but she was afraid of side-effects, so now she has another unintended pregnancy," or "With such effective contraception available, that pregnancy was totally preventable."

With every technological advance, there are winners and losers, accolades ands caveats. I just wish that in the case of this particular advancement, there was not the ever-present danger of reverting to putting the onus of prevention on the woman...not to mention the burdens of blame and shame. My hope is that as we, as providers, encourage and educate about IUDs and the like, we don't forget about the condom on a banana instructions and real lessons on fertility awareness--thereby increasing the efficacy of legitimate contraceptive methods, whether or not they're award-winning in our books. In other words, I hope that we continue to respect women and their bodies and their choices, from contraception to termination.

2 comments:

  1. You are always going to have people who cannot put themselves in another's shoes and therefore choose to blame. Some of us can't use and IUD and IUDs can come out. If you honestly look at unintended pregnancy as something blameworthy instead of just something that life throws at a person than you have lived too sheltered a life and have no imagination or empathy. Why would we care what such a person thinks of us?

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  2. A missed period is a definite early sign of pregnancy but even before you miss any period there are so many other early sign of the pregnancy that can tell you whether or not you are pregnant. However, the problem with most of the early sign of pregnancy is that are similar to what you may observe before the arrival of the period. Determining whether you are pregnant or not with the help of the early sign of pregnancy without any pregnancy test is just like solving a difficult puzzle. It is not compulsory that every single women experience every early sign of pregnancy. However, it is also unlikely that you do not experience any one of them.

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This is not a debate forum -- there are hundreds of other sites for that. This is a safe space for abortion care providers and one that respects the full spectrum of reproductive choices; comments that are not in that spirit will either wind up in the spam filter or languish in the moderation queue.