Birth Control.

Today, I purchased my second-ever round of birth control. Today I also had a rousing bout of what my beloved physician referred to as "dysmenhorrea," or what I like to refer to as the Cramps of Doom. For those of you fortunate enough to possess either regular and not-hateful menstruation or else not a uterus, the Cramps of Doom cause me to be unable to stand, sit, lie down, move, breathe, think, or do pretty much anything for four to five hours at a time. Imagine someone lighting your internal organs on fire. (I'm completely serious, there's really no way to exaggerate this kind of pain.) This might happen once at the beginning of my "time o' the month" as my body's way of letting me know it is indeed my girly time, or else at the very end, just in case I thought for a second that I was going to get out of it this month. Sometimes I get lucky and it'll happen twice in the same week. When I was twelve, people told me this would go away as I got older. People lied. Lied lied lied.

So finally I go to the doctor last month and she tells me she knows of only one thing that will cure it and sends me to see Deb the Wal Mart pharmacist with a prescription for birth control pills. I called her again after the Cramps of Doom released me from their clutches and returned to the Underworld, to ask what gives. She said it would take a few rounds to start seeing improvement, which just about figures.

Let it be known! I'm not ashamed of my lack of a social life and my complete disinterest in the rigamarole of dating. I am not now, nor do I plan on engaging in romantic escapades of any sort, least of which those that would result in a child.

Am I perfectly able to pay for my birth control? Well, yes. Is nine dollars a month prohibitively expensive for a college student like myself? Not really.

And yet. I was confused as to why my birth control being covered by insurance is even a controversial subject. People acted like it was a tragic loss of freedom and the American way when it was proposed to be covered with the rest of necessary healthcare. My six-dollar antibiotics for strep throat last January were covered by insurance. My mother's asthma meds, my step dad's pain medication, my little brother's x-rays, all have several things in common with my little birth control pill. Some of them are preventative and guard against health threats, or else treat/assist in the treatment of health threats. My pill does both. So am I perfectly able to pay for my pills? Yes. Does it make sense to me why I might ever not be able to, when I need them to be able to function like a normal human being and not miss a day of class and work like I did today? Not particularly. But I like being on friendly terms with my uterus more than I like my nine dollars.

But then I'm forced to consider what I'd do if I couldn't afford these pills. What if I didn't have financial aid to make ends meet? What if I had four kids already? What if my hypothetical spouse passed away and left me with some hefty bills? I'm just saying, worst-case scenario. (And make no mistake, someone somewhere is living your worst-case scenario right this very second.) Why could we then still give me antibiotics for my cough, but not birth control for my monthly agony?

What if I didn't need to prevent one of the many, many medical conditions such as endometriosis or ovarian cysts that can be treated with the pill, and was instead trying to prevent having another child that I couldn't afford? Wouldn't a poverty-stricken mother be the very last person we should be trying to keep from birth control? (Married women can be poverty-stricken too. Or just, y'know, practicing a little responsible family planning.)

If you answered that question with some variant of "Weeell, if she has that many children and no way to raise them, perhaps she should not be having sex at all." Here, we really get into it. So then, the real problem with expanding access to birth control via tax dollars is the belief that there should be no such thing as consequence-less sex. Perhaps you feel that only unmarried women are poor enough to be unable to afford birth control. Even if I were to pretend that were true, it still doesn't explain away why we as a society are okay with allowing a poor, uneducated, unmarried woman to birth a child as some kind of lesson to her about having premarital sex. Why wouldn't we be doing everything we could to prevent one more unwanted baby?

Is that something you could give nine dollars to? It's something I could give nine dollars to.