Judging by this title, maybe some of you clicking on this particular article are thinking I’m going to turn this into a Bible thumping rant about how anti-Christian birth control is. And some of you probably believe that because of one key word in this title: Christian. Yes, I am a Christian: born and raised. My whole family is, actually. And my younger cousins on my dad’s side, who are 100% Armenians, go to church every Sunday and sit there for two hours for two ceremonies: one in English and the other in Armenian. For eighteen years I was put through Catholic education and I had applied to two Catholic colleges along with Rhode Island College. So, yes, I believe in God and Jesus and I’m proud to say I do. However, as I have said to many friends, just because I am Christian doesn’t mean I blindly believe in everything the Church preaches. Which brings us to my article topic of this week: my view of birth control and other contraceptives as a Christian.
The reason I’ve decided to talk about this particular topic is because I feel there’s a lot of negativity surrounding birth control; not just in the Church, but in society. If a woman is open about the fact she’s on birth control, some people automatically assume she’s on it for the simple reason she’s having sex. Being born and raised in a Catholic family, I never knew much about birth control at all—something I want to delve into a little deeper later in this piece. Then, I met a girl I quickly became friends with who talked a lot about her being on the pill. Unfortunately, the first thought that came into my head when I heard her say that was, “Oh, wow, she must do it a lot.” However, as I have gotten older, I’ve begun to realize there are many other reasons women choose to start birth control.
For me, I was put on birth control for medical reasons. Back in March of 2016 during my spring break, I was laid up in bed for two weeks with an ovarian cyst. For those of you who don't know what a cyst is, they’re little growths which contain pretty nasty things like pus, liquid, or gas. They can pop up anywhere on the body and even though they don’t sound too bad, they’re painful little buggers, especially when one sits directly on your ovary. When I felt the pain, I panicked because just the year before I had appendicitis and the pain from the cyst was pretty reminiscent of that. Even after my doctor was able to determine the cause of the pain, there wasn’t anything she could do. All we could do was wait for the cyst to burst. Finally, on the Sunday ending spring break, the thing popped, but the pain remained for another week before my ovary healed. It was an extremely painful, terrible experience and I hope I never have to relive it ever again.
After that whole debacle, I went to a follow-up appointment with my doctor and she informed me the only way to prevent any more cysts at my age was to go on birth control. I had to admit, I was nervous at first. I was worried about what people would think of me if they ever found out I was on the pill. But now, I honestly couldn't care less.
Women have all kinds of different, personal reasons why they want to be on birth control. And if they are doing it to prevent surprise pregnancies while they’re sexually active, it shouldn’t matter to anyone! Some women might even be on it just so they don’t have to worry about Aunty Flo every month, which is honestly one of the biggest upsides to the pill. Women shouldn’t need to explain themselves as to why they’ve chosen to start taking birth control.
Moving on to another issue, I’d like to talk about sex ed. As you can imagine, sex education in a private, Catholic school system isn’t the same as public schools. Even though we learned about all the awful and disgusting STDs and STIs, the one message I actually remember from those classes was this; Abstinence is the only one hundred percent way to prevent an STD. Looking back on those lessons now as a twenty-year-old in college, I laugh. Sure abstinence is great and all, but it’s not very realistic. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people are capable of staying abstinent until marriage and I truly admire you. However, I really don’t think it’s responsible for schools to push the idea of abstinence being the only real way of preventing STDs or STIs. Obviously, it’s different in public schools where they openly discuss condoms and birth control but I personally believe Catholic schools need to do more.
When you’re teaching a group of young, mostly inexperienced teenagers about sex and sexually transmitted diseases, Catholic schools need to separate the Church’s belief from sex education. As mentioned before, it's not realistic to discuss abstinence as the only method of prevention against sexually transmitted diseases. Once those teenagers graduate high school and move on to college, things will most certainly change. In my sex education classes, there was no mention what-so-ever of condoms or birth control. I didn’t even know those things existed until just about my junior or senior year of high school and it was because my girlfriends and I used to talk about it when we were alone. I do understand the Catholic Church views birth control as “intrinsically evil”—as quoted by BBC—but the whole world doesn’t follow the beliefs of Christians. Not giving Catholic teenagers the right information while in high school and sending them off into a completely different environment like college is potentially dangerous. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who is also a nurse who explained things to me as I got older, but other children might not have that advantage. I believe students in Catholic schools need to be properly educated about sex: and that includes discussing protection such as birth control and condoms.
I know this might seem like a pretty heavy-duty article topic and I am aware a lot of people might not feel the same way I do. However, I still do think it is a woman’s choice to decide whether or not she needs or wants to be on any type of contraceptive. As aforementioned, there are plenty of reasons why women decide to start birth control and none of us should be judged for our decisions. A woman’s body is an extremely complicated and often times scary thing to deal with. And none of us should be criticized for the way we take care of our bodies.