Originally published in Lilith Magazine, Spring 2009.
The Pill celebrates its 50th birthday this year, and many kudos are due for the incredible opportunities it afforded women through effective contraception that needs no male participation. We who believe so strongly in women’s reproductive rights laud these gains, while we’ve also become activists exploring the downside the Pill brings with it: the documented risks of stroke, breast cancer, blood clots and (sadly ironic) decreased female sexual desire. As in the Margaret Sanger era, we renew our demands for safer options. And we need to launch piercingly honest discussions among girls and women, boys and men that unite us in a surely universal goal of consensual sexuality buttressed by birth control that doesn’t endanger female health.
How? What about a rousing revival of hell-raising feminist ethics embodied by plucky pioneers like Barbara Seaman? At the same time that she championed women’s reproductive and sexual rights, she persisted in pointing out the Pill’s health hazards. Her groundbreaking 1969 book, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, ignited feminists who then disrupted 1970 Senate hearings with shouts of “Why is there no Pill for men?” (still a damn good question) and won first-ever mandates to place patient warnings on prescription drug packaging, inaugurated by Pill packet side-effect advisories. Seaman continued to speak out about hormone risks and demand better contraceptive solutions until her death in 2008.
The time is ripe to let rip on whole new levels of multigenerational feminist repro-activism. Let’s tell the truth about contraceptives, with hormonal methods kept an accessible option but other less risky methods given equal priority. Let’s be bold in our conversations with sons and daughters, mining the oversexualized media aimed at kids to spark soul-baring conversations about sex. Let’s reflect together about how using methods that aren’t “invisible” like the Pill give us more opportunities to be deliberate about our sexual choices and hopefully, make wiser ones. Let’s have fun celebrating our escape from the bad old days of the Pill’s infancy (one word: girdles) and delight in enacting a new “normal” that finally delivers on true sexual and reproductive freedom promised 50 years ago.