Preventing Abortions with Planned Parenthood

Years ago, at an atheist meeting, a Christian showed up, as was wont to happen every few months or so. I decided that I would take one for the team and fully engage him so that others could have the more nuanced conversations that drew most people to the meetings. Lucky for me (but not for him), his prepared topic of conversation for the time he had chosen to break bread with us baby-eaters was abortion.

He led not with a question, but with an assumption that we atheists tended to support reproductive rights. He wasn’t wrong (though of course there are some over-represented exceptions among atheists). I decided to ask him a question: “How many abortions have you prevented?”

My inquiry may have dumbfounded him for a while, but I was hardly exaggerating or lying. At the time, I was an unofficial guerrilla unwanted-pregnancy-preventer thanks to Planned Parenthood. Continue reading “Preventing Abortions with Planned Parenthood”

Preventing Abortions with Planned Parenthood
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For Instant Pooh-Poohing, Just Add Sex

A few months ago, I visited a doctor for reasons utterly and completely unrelated to my reproductive status and health, unless you view all nulliparous women as potential mothers: it was to renew a prescription. After he had asked me all of the relevant questions and I was approved, he decided to tack on a warning, one that I had heard before, about how I should not use the medication if I were nursing, pregnant, or planning on becoming pregnant. I laughed and said that said situation was as close to impossible as it could get for me.

I don’t know what reaction I expected — an answering laugh, perhaps. What I didn’t expect was for him to give me a stern lecture on how no measures could totally preclude pregnancy as a possibility and that no matter how careful I was, “something could still happen.”

Is there any other area of life where safety measures are so underhyped?
Continue reading “For Instant Pooh-Poohing, Just Add Sex”

For Instant Pooh-Poohing, Just Add Sex

Top 7 Birth Control and Abortion Myths

We all know that standard (a.k.a. latex and polyurethane) condoms don’t have little holes in them to let the AIDS swim right through (as a woman accompanying Brother Jed once solemnly told me), that the amount of birth control pills someone takes doesn’t correlate with the amount of sex they are having, and that you don’t get STIs from having sex during menstruation (true story: one religious book I read claimed this was the case), right? One would hope.

On the other hand, there are plenty of notions floating around concerning the prevention of dropping unwanted crotch-fruit that are simply false, but make sense on some level. Continue reading “Top 7 Birth Control and Abortion Myths”

Top 7 Birth Control and Abortion Myths