MULTIPLE CHOICE
There’s still no perfect method of birth control. CAITLIN AGNEW weighs the hassles and fears.
IN 1995, LONG BEFORE ROMANCE WAS COMPLICATED BY THINGS
like Tinder and Facebook, Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes coined the term “sponge-worthy,” to describe whether a man was worth sleeping with, while rationing a small personal stash of her favourite contraceptive sponges after they were taken off the market. A trailblazer for sexually liberated TV characters like Girls’ Hannah Horvath and Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, Elaine showed prime-time viewers that women had taken reproductive responsibility into their own hands, whether that was by using a sponge, a diaphragm (Carrie’s method of choice) or their popular sister, oral contraceptives.
Twenty years later, in the age of fourth-wave feminism, hook-up culture and Goop-level vigilance over what we put in our bodies, the 55-year-old
*NAME HAS BEEN CHANGED pill is looking as out of date as Elaine’s frumpy wardrobe. Taking a pill at the same time every day can be a nuisance, it doesn’t protect against STIs and its potential side effects, like mood changes or a lower sex drive, are deal breakers for some. Nearly half of all pregnancies in North America are unplanned and the pill has a failure rate of eight to nine per cent. So some women are making defiant personal choices when it comes to enjoying their sex lives.
For Cathleen*, a 30-year-old publicist in Toronto, that’s using the withdrawal method, the third most commonly used method of contraception in Canada, according to the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada. “I used the pill throughout university but found that taking it on a daily basis at a consistent time was inconvenient,” she says. She and her husband started to “pull out and pray” about four years ago and are comfortable with the 20 per cent chance of pregnancy that comes with withdrawal. Other women in steady relationships are combining withdrawal or condom use with the old-school rhythm method, for which you track your menstrual cycle so you know when you’re ovulating. It’s also gaining a higher digital profile—this fall, Apple’s iOS 9 will allow users to map their periods, and apps like NaturalCycles monitor your cycle when you input your temperature (your basal body temperature rises after ovulation). The app has about 50,000 registered users in 89 countries, including Canada, with an average age of 27. Rumours of the next update of NaturalCycles involve integration with the Apple Watch, removing the need to take your temperature orally every morning. But Dr. Dustin Costescu, assistant professor and family planning specialist at McMaster University, cautions this type of hormone-free birth control should only be used by couples ready to accept the consequences of an unintended pregnancy. “If you get it wrong, you’ve had intercourse on a fertile day, so your risk of pregnancy is actually very high,” he says.
Taking the pill means ingesting artificial hormones, something that many of today’s health-conscious women are »