Peace of Mind

There’s one obvious point I rarely see made in discussions of the Emergency Contraception controversy: most of the women who take it aren’t pregnant, and wouldn’t have become pregnant. As those who’ve spent thousands on infertility treatment know too well, unprotected sex does not lead directly to pregnancy. According to a couple of different sources, the average woman has an 8 or 9 percent chance of getting knocked up at the most fertile point in her cycle. I suck at math, but I’m pretty sure that means statistically, crossing your fingers and hoping really hard you’re not pregnant after unprotected sex has a better than 90 percent success rate.

So in the vast majority of cases, the question of whether EC prevents conception or interferes with implantation is moot: sperm and egg were never gonna hook up anyway. Even if you believe it is an abortifacient, the number of “abortions” it will cause is negligible. Yeah, yeah, one is too many. But considering it’s apparently impossible to prove how EC works, and we can only assume it’s preventing pregnancy at all in maybe 6 or 7 out of 100 women who take it (1 or 2 will end up pregnant anyway), aren’t there better battles to fight?

The thing is, if you’re a woman who might be pregnant, you’re not thinking in terms of statistics; you’re thinking in terms of the people you know who’ve gotten pregnant accidentally, the people you’ve heard about, and how very, very much you do not want to join their ranks. Even if the odds are on your side, the stakes are way too fucking high to take the gamble.The number one purpose of EC is not contraception or abortion–it’s peace of mind. The whole fucking point is that if you take it, you can mostly stop worrying about whether you’re pregnant, which you probably weren’t anyway.

I’ve taken EC once, in a committed relationship, after a generally reliable form of contraception failed. It wasn’t easy or convenient, by any means; I spent most of the day between pills puking my guts out, and that evening in bed with a migraine so bad I could do nothing but weep. (As any actually pregnant woman can tell you, getting blasted with hormones is no fucking fun.) And that was after the doctor who prescribed it–a man who’d never met me, who knew nothing about my medical history, my sexual history, or the relationship I was in at the time–snotted, “Next time, try the pill” at me as he wrote the prescription. (I still don’t even get that… “Next time” sorta suggests it’s already too late for the pill, doesn’t it?)

So, let’s recap. I was a voting adult (and then some), in a long-term monogamous relationship, using birth control responsibly. And I had an accident. I then endured humiliation by a judgmental doctor and spent 24 hours in physical agony, just to insure that I would not become pregnant, even though the chances of that were awfully slight to begin with. That is not remotely the way I would choose to go about things. But it would have been even worse to spend weeks after that wondering if I was pregnant, and much, much worse to lose the gamble and be confronted with an unwanted pregnancy.

The controversy over EC is not about whether it “kills babies.” It is about whether women should be allowed to have sex and maintain their peace of mind. I’d argue that most debates over reproductive freedom come down to that basic issue, but this one does unquestionably. Most of the women who take EC are not and would not have become pregnant. Why does that fact keep getting lost in these discussions?

Before I descend into complete bitterness yet again, big love to Blagojevich. I don’t give a crap if he’s “only doing it for re-election.” I am fucking thrilled to live in a state where that’s what will get you elected.