For the longest time, women have been portrayed as automatic mothers, that, simply because most women are “made” to make babies, all of us want to. Then voices cut through schooling the world that, hey, wait a minute: Plenty of women don’t, in fact, want babies at all. But left out in the cold in this either/or proposition is the fact that lots of women simply are not sure either way.
It is the more interesting aspect of the recent online discussion about women who are ditching the pill for the pullout method (which doesn’t seem like news at all but rather How People Have Done It for Ages).
Ann Friedman has a piece over at The Cut about a new book, Sweetening the Pill, which details the woes of using hormonal birth control. In the piece, she introduces a “pullout generation” of women who are content to use a less-than-perfect method of birth control — AKA, the withdrawal method — if it means not having to put up with all the hassle/side effects/issues of proper birth control.
Pulling out is not new or anything. Wikipedia’s entry on ye olde “coitus interruptus” says it’s been widely used for “at least two millennia,” and cites research estimating that, as of 1991, 38 million couples worldwide were using the old what-the-hell approach. It’s been said to be at least as effective as using a condom, thought that has been refuted with the assertion that condoms are being used incorrectly. 2011 research indicates that with “typical” use, condoms resulted in 18 unintended pregnancies per 100 people vs 22 unintended pregnancies per 100 with typical use of the withdrawal method.
Perhaps what is new to many of us is reading that perfectly smart, educated women who live in big cities and have access to contraception and who know perfectly well how getting knocked up works — and the headaches it could cause — would use pulling out. Thirtysomething educated women should know better, right? Only dumb, poor people get knocked up accidentally.
But what I like so much about Friedman’s piece is exactly that — it de-stigmatizes a behavior long associated with the “less fortunate” and reframes it as just a people thing: either we are all dumb or we are actually a little more intuitive about our bodies, circumstances and situations than we’re given credit for. And by the way, men are a big part of this, too. Friedman outlines the reasons her interviewees were OK with the risk of a less effective/unsafe method of avoiding pregnancy:
- The hormonal hell of the pill
- The IUD is scary/long-term
- You’re in a long-term relationship
- You have access to Plan B should you have an unwanted pregnancy
- You use a period tracker app and use condoms when ovulating
- You’re sharing the burden of potential pregnancy with a dude instead of carrying it alone
But over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte brings up another big one: Maybe these people aren’t really avoiding pregnancy. Meaning, all this depends on what you mean by unintended pregnancy.
Perhaps, she argues, thirtysomethings are less frightened of breeding than they may have been in their twenties and the method makes more sense, and as such, they are cool with this risk because they are cool with the ambiguity of it. (The women in their twenties Friedman spoke with were more likely to find themselves using the withdrawal method when they were hooking up after drinking, or were too shy, embarrassed or impatient to broach the subject of safer sex.)
The concept here is called “pregnancy ambivalence,” and Marcotte argues that this gray area — when men and women are not entirely sure whether they want to get pregnant or not — is not talked about enough, and could be a bigger factor in using the withdrawal method than people realize: