The Price of the Pill

What do you say to a teenager who confides that she and her boyfriend are having sex? For many parents, physicians, and counselors, a response that is both sensitive and courageous eludes them in much the same way it eluded my well-meaning helpers nearly 25 years ago.

I went on the pill at the age of 15. Now that I am older, with three teenage children of my own, it is not difficult for me to understand the motives of those who led me to it. Yet if I could go back in time, I would not only tell them not to do it again, I would also challenge some of the assumptions about contraception within their own lives as well.

My high-school counselor acted as my go-between, arranging a meeting with a local gynecologist who she said would be willing to provide me with some manufacturer’s samples of oral contraceptives. I do not remember warnings or lectures—or any truly meaningful talk about what I was doing—only her compassionate concern and the doctor’s barely concealed consternation.

My counselor could not have been more supportive. She filled out a pass to excuse my absence from morning classes on the day I visited the doctor. And she offered to “be there” whenever I needed her. She was a single woman in her midthirties, the daughter of a wealthy businessman from town, and I respected her opinion and was comfortable talking to her about almost anything.

My doctor was brusque. Without performing an exam or taking any kind of medical history, he gave me a 12-month supply. He seemed nervous and unaccustomed to providing the pill to someone my age. Expecting the doctor to change his mind at the last minute, I grabbed the packets of dials before they disappeared. Later, I hid them under a pile of socks in my dresser drawer.

Taking the pills immediately began to alter my appearance. I gained weight and my hips widened. My mother noticed and asked if I was taking the pill. I told her matter-of-factly that I had gone to a doctor who gave me a handful of samples. My honesty provoked a surprising reaction: She calmly suggested I have a complete physical to determine the kind of oral contraceptive best suited to my medical needs.

An active Episcopalian in a liberal suburban congregation, my mother deplored the Vatican’s then-recent publication of Humanae Vitae, which condemned artificial birth control. Wanting to do what was best for me, she set up an appointment with her gynecologist.

Over the next three years, I avoided getting pregnant and claimed to be liberated from traditional restraints, all the while naïvely thinking I was in control of my own destiny. I refused to consider that I might be being “used” by the young men I was dating. I know better than that now.

One day I met the man who would later became my husband. And that is when I finally began to grieve over what had happened.

The Psyche Of A Woman

I began taking the pill as a teenager because I wanted to “protect” myself. Like many women, I feared the psychological damage of an unwanted pregnancy more than I feared the emotional and spiritual consequences of sin. What I discovered, too late, was that sex outside marriage is particularly damaging to the psyche of the female. Unlike men, women tend not to think of sex in terms of conquest: there is too much that by necessity must be yielded. For us, it is more an act of surrender than exploit.

Providing the pill (and other forms of contraception) to an unmarried woman does more than prevent her from getting pregnant: it may also erode her ability to say no to sex. It can make her more vulnerable to the pressures of a man in search of physical gratification. The potential for sexual abuse, fornication, sexual addictions, adultery, and the perpetration of double standards grows instead of diminishes. The pill was not designed to treat or cure anything, but only to make sex easy. Women come out losers. “Baby-proofing” them increases the odds of their being sexually used by, and sexually using, men.

This increased vulnerability is not often articulated. At a time when abortion-related controversies regularly appear in daily papers, when college and career often dominate childbearing choices, and when the notion of “biology as destiny” is seen as the chief enemy of equal rights, effective contraceptive technology appears to be a remedy to the “problem” of female fertility. But the cyclical reality of women’s sexuality is not just another medical problem to be treated with a monthly sequence of color-coded tablets or a cluster of plastic implants injected into an upper arm. It has to do with how we were designed to live and love in God’s Creation.

While men’s sexual biology involves two physiological functions (generation and ejaculation of sperm), for women there are up to six separate physiological functions. The pill was designed to effectively eliminate five of these—ovulation, normal menstruation, gestation, parturition, and lactation—leaving women with only copulation as a sexual function. Equality between the sexes, indeed—but at the price of sameness.

Intercourse On Demand

There are ramifications for the use of birth control in marriage, too. If oneness through genital activity is the supreme goal of sex, then we may have finally arrived at our destination. Natural patterns of fertility are increasingly subjugated to the overriding ideal of intercourse on demand. Deactivated wombs and dry breasts are chosen by couples as a long-term marital norm. Career plans, ministry opportunities, material comforts, and “lifestyle manageability” often postpone or even exclude children from marital plans. The balance between exercising our God-given right to control and manage Creation and submitting to God’s will within Creation gets lost.

But God’s purposes cannot be thwarted so simply by a packet of pills, a cluster of Silastic implants, or an intrauterine device. Throughout Scripture, fertility is a gift, not a liability, and its place in our lives deserves more respect.

I went off the pill when I wanted to conceive a child and never took oral contraceptives again. Pregnancy, giving birth, and breast-feeding turned out to be great, grand, healing experiences for me. This was territory I grew to know and appreciate: tender, midnight moments with my babies tucked in the rocking chair beside me; feeling my little ones grow inside the womb until the final contractions of labor forced them out into the world; holding my new daughter’s life in my lap and weeping over her in amazement, stroking the downy hair on the top of her head with my fingertips. These activities did much to mend the wounds in my soul and spirit, and I thank God for allowing me to participate in his kingdom in this way.

Maternity and motherhood substantially recreated my femininity, with nature as my tutor. I say this realizing that to be truly feminine one certainly doesn’t need to marry or bear children or wear beautiful clothes or submit to men—even when they are unreasonable. Mother Teresa has demonstrated this principle beautifully during her ministry as a celibate woman. In a most powerful way, she has freely offered the milk of human kindness in service to the poor, reminding us that there are things God chooses for each of us to do. We call her Mother with good reason.

Nevertheless, it was through the bearing of children that I began to understand better the warping of sex in our culture. Before becoming a mother, I viewed my womb and breasts as optional parts rather than as integral, even symbolic, aspects of women’s sexuality. How absurd this seems now! (What male, after all, thinks his testes optional?) Our society’s portrayal of the female breast, so prominently displayed—sans milk, of course—in everything from Budweiser posters to vacation commercials, says a great deal about our cultural attitudes toward women’s sexuality.

I wonder: Might Madonna actually be a mass-marketed version of Aldous Huxley’s Lenina—who embodied eroticism, but was disgusted by pregnancy and motherhood? Will cultural attempts to remake women into wombless and milk-free objects continue to backfire? Could the hypereroticization of women prove to be the ultimate turnoff? Does nature have something to teach us after all?

The natural connection between sex and procreation bears scrutiny. When this connection is severed for the sake of convenience, something precious about female sexuality may be lost, making women more vulnerable to objectification by men. This is not to say by any means that family planning is wrong, just that it is possible to abuse it. I fear we tamper with sex too quickly, and without proper regard for the blessing and protection that marriage and motherhood can offer women.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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