Population control often times crosses my mind every time I run into some asshole who seems like a total waste of skin. My suggestion comes packaged within three little letters: I.U.D.
For those of you who don’t know what an IUD is, and surprisingly there are many, it’s what is referred to as an Intrauterine Device. It’s very tiny and shaped like a cross, and it’s made up of plastic and copper. For reasons not completely understood by doctors, it prevents an egg from being fertilized by sperm during sexual intercourse. They theorize that the copper acts as a deflector and repels sperm away. The IUD is generally implanted in women who have already conceived one or more children and doesn’t want to take the drastic step of tubal ligation, but any female can be fitted with one. It gives a woman a choice. It’s 99% effective and it lasts up to 10 years.
Although I’ve never had a child, I chose to get one, after many scares when I screwed up my pill schedule. It is one of the single best decisions I have ever made as a responsible adult woman, who wants to choose when and with whom I will have a child with. I love my IUD and the freedom from anxiety that it gives me.
I remember being 15 and in high school. Sex Ed class was very informative about everything like birth control, including the IUD. All my girlfriends were already on The Pill. We were going with the excuse that “it regulates your period” as a reason for taking it. But in reality, the majority of them had started to have sex. We sat around and we fantasized about the perfect circumstances in which our first time would actually happen and with whom we hoped it would happen with. Intercourse was not a casual thing for teenagers, at least not when I was in High School. And forget about oral sex! OMG, that was a taboo subject, something to be discussed in hushed tones only!
Things have changed in such a way that’s its hard to stomach the statistics of kids engaging in sexual behavior at school, on school buses, etc; and most disturbing is the statistic on teen pregnancy. 1 in 3 teenagers report that they have been pregnant before the age of 20. That’s huge when you consider the demographic, political, moral and religious concerns that could have an effect on a young scared pregnant girl decision-making ability. Let’s say, for example, she lives right in the midst of the Bible Belt in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is a socially conservative, highly religious state. Obviously she has a lot more to think about other than her mental and emotional readiness at having a child while still a teen. And it’s sad that that is not an uncommon scenario.
With sex being used as such a strong marketing tool in our society, its fascinating to me how it’s often juxtaposed to the taboo way in which we treat it, specifically in reference to how we address younger generations. How much information is too much, and at what age do we start to teach them? The fact of the matter is that kids are engaging in sexual activity at extraordinarily young ages. Most kids asked don’t beli
