If I’m any indication, women spend an incredible amount of time mulling over, dealing with and, definitely in my case, whining about birth control. Anyone close to me knows I have a laundry list of gripes about it, in all its maddening, life-saving forms. Where one makes me dizzy, the other makes me depressed; I feel continually limited by my options. And yet, I have full, unbridled access.
As birth control continues to be politicized and women’s governance over their bodies continues to be debated by (mostly) old dudes, I’ve been thinking a lot about how lucky I am to whine about IUDs and pills and patches. So many women are increasingly and horrifyingly losing that privilege. So in celebration of the frustrating and comforting freedom to choose, I asked a bunch of women (and a couple men) to pen me their best birth control haikus: the good parts, the bad parts, the at-least-we-have-it parts. Together they paint a colorful picture of what it looks like to control your own body, a right that shouldn’t be up for debate.
Take a stroll through the above, write me your own, then catch up on our other poetic endeavors re: sex, virginity, first kisses, giving birth, pickup lines and puberty, and join in there too.
Slides designed by Emily Zirimis.
