Birth Control - Can you live without it?

This is a topic that is held close to a lot of people’s hearts, particularly women. And for good reason! Who wants too many children to feed and look after properly? Certainly not me and yet here I am, the mother of three lovely princesses (all planned!)and pharmacist, asking you if birth control is essential and if you can do without it.

Yes, I know, it’s a scary thought!

Looking over on Reddit, there is a lot of talk about the use of birth control, the US government seems to be asking that religious organisations be made to have health insurance that covers things like contraceptives.  I definitely do not claim to know all the ins and outs of that but it brought me to a subject that I hold dear to my heart – Women and Birth Control.

When I came to get married, I started to think about birth control and as is usually the way with us ladies, I immediately headed towards hormonal contraception.  I discarded any thought of the daily pill as I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would forget to take it so I opted for the hormonal Injection, Depo-Provera.  I did not have to think of it for 12 weeks! Woohoo! Except…my periods disappeared which I thought I would be happy about but I felt out of control, felt low all the time, any feelings of attraction to my partner waned and I put on at least 14pounds – Not so great.

So, I came off that and chose the coil – the non-hormonal variety (IUD –Intra-Uterine Device).  I used this for a while but my periods were heavier and a lot more painful but I put up with it until I spoke to my mother about it and she mentioned that she had never used any of the regular contraceptives her whole life.  AND she had planned to have four children – 2 girls and 2 boys -  and that is exactly what she had got.  I thought it was time to look into this.

So I started to dig deeper into this concept and came across this book – Taking Charge of Your fertility – by Toni Weschler.  I had vaguely heard about Natural family planning but I mostly thought it was the ranting of one religious cult or the other- I may be Christian but that did not mean I was going to let it all hang out.  I did however know there had to be another way of choosing when I had children without permanently changing my body chemistry or having a mercury-laden coil inside of me.

It was at this point that I began to reassess everything I knew about my own fertility.  I have an aunt who used the pill for a while and it took her ten years to get pregnant after that but then I also have friends who fell pregnant within a month, some a year of stopping it, so a mixed bag of results.  The thing I was aware of however was that I knew very little about my body, my cycles and I had left control of it all to people who knew even less about me and to whom I was just a number. 

This article is about getting you to think about some of the choices you make when it concerns your body - How might it affect your future if you are yet to have offspring, how does it affect your present health and well-being and how might the side effects affect your health as you get older?

Whatever you choose to do about your birth control, I encourage you to pick up the book and just learn about your body and how to take charge of your fertility.

I have no specific answers for you as we are all unique and must come to our conclusions.  One thing I know for certain is this:

Birth control, can you live without it? No