I am going to get all personal/political here, for just a minute, so bear with me.

Obviously medicine that prevents pregnancy is preventative medicine. I don’t even know how you’d make an argument otherwise. I am also troubled by this idea of a hierarchy of uses of contraception— that somehow preventing menstrual pain or endometriosis is more acceptable than preventing pregnancy.

All of that said, I think that when people imagine the users of contraception, they do not imagine nearly 30-year old married women who want to have children.

After the miscarriage, I had to have six months of blood tests to make sure that errant fetal cells did not stick around and decide to grow into a tumor. You test for that by checking levels of pregnancy hormones in your blood. If the levels rose, I’d go through a round of (mild) chemotherapy. If I had gotten pregnant in that period, my doctors would not have been able to check to make sure I did not have fetal cells running amok (another way of saying cancer). Having tumors and a pregnancy at the same time is ill-advised (my doctor used the word “dangerous”), so I was told I needed to go on birth control.

Having a miscarriage at twelve weeks is really fucking shitty. It was truly one of the shittiest things I have gone through, which I say as someone who has gone through a respectable, albeit not exceptional, number of shitty things. In addition, going to the lab at the obstetrician’s office on a weekly basis, surrounded by parenting magazines and joyful pregnant ladies trying to make eye contact and smile at me while scar tissue collected in my veins, was shitty. Taking a birth control pill every single morning as a reminder that I was not, in fact, having a baby, was also shitty.

Most of those shitty things were unavoidable— simply part of the proverbial fabric of life. But paying $50 out of pocket every month for those birth control pills was a shitty thing that could have been avoided.

Perhaps you think this is uncomfortably personal. I also think this is uncomfortably personal. Unfortunately, many of our elected officials and anti-choice groups think this is an appropriate topic for national political debate. I would encourage you to go sign a petition asking the White House to resist pressure to allow many employers, including universities and hospitals, to refuse to cover birth control.

(Source: think-progress, via thoseareturkeys)