Blog for choice

I don't like the contraceptive options I have. Nope. I sure don't.

I don't like that most of the birth control available for women involves new and not improved ways to stun our ovaries into submission with fuck loads of hormone. If the drugs only zapped ovaries, it'd be one thing. But those drugs have necessarily non trivial effects on your body and can mess with your head, in a very real ischemic kind of way.

The Sponge was a reasonable alternative to the hormone hell of bcps. Back in the Sponge.1 years, it was just bcps as they hadn't yet gotten into hormone patches, injections, and implants (shudder). Sponge.1 was great for those of us lucky enough to not be allergic to it, but despite being IMMENSELY popular, Sponge.1 was yanked. Although after a nearly 11 year hiatus, I hear tell it's back now. The making of Sponge.2 is great news for women who spent the late 90s making difficult "spongeworthy" choices.

But where does that leave us? Essentially with the same sorts of choices for contraceptive that we had in 1992. That isn't really an improvement.

I don't like that other than condoms (which were invented when, like in the upper neolithic era, right?) there are no male-based contraceptives yet on the market. It's the twenty first century. Weren't we supposed to have super cool shit like "the male pill" by now?

While I'm on the subject of male versus female pills, I have to say that I really don't like that "woman problems" don't warrant the same kind of medical attention and research dollars that shit like male "erectile dysfunction" garners ("dysfunction" is not my prefered word here since the term implies it's somehow normal for an 80 year old man with PVOD to have an all night erection, which btw, it's not.) This is related to my dissatisfaction with contraceptive choice since both result from a simply shocking lack of consideration for women's health in mainstream medical and medication culture.

This brings me to a related issue, and one that bears on the topic of blogging for choice, which I will get to in a second. I am not happy that most of the big women's and reproductive rights groups I know of apparently give very little of a public shit about improving safety and variety in contraceptive choices and/or women's health care options. Efficacy of birth control, yes, that they care about. But when the news was breaking that the makers of birth control patches hid information that their product had a higher health risk than some of the commonly used pills, there was hardly a peep out of these groups. And that pissed me off oodles. It still pisses me off.

I guess you could say I am anti-limited choice and possibly I am anti-prochoice groups, but I am certainly not anti-choice. I'm pro-choices, lots of them and better ones than what we've got.

And so I am joining the "blog for choice" day on this year's anniversary of Roe V Wade, January 22.



Here's the info in case you're not in the mood to chase links*.

On January 22nd - the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade - we are asking pro-choice bloggers to join us in a day of activism for choice. Blog for Choice Day is a chance to raise the profile of reproductive rights issues in the blogosphere and the media, and to let everyone know that a woman's right to choose is nonnegotiable.

This year's topic is a simple one: tell us, and your readers, why you're pro-choice.



*I stole NARAL's button. They provided a jpg but it was linkless, and I have not devoted the time to learning html well enough to do it myself. I tried and failed several times here so I resorted to thievery but it's thievery for a good cause. The NARAL site offers a jpg to download (they called it a "blog button") which is swell but without a link it's just a picture, is it?