My period came today. The cramps are…bad. In fact, they’re worse than they were even just last month, because a few weeks ago, I made a choice that increasing numbers of young, childless American women share: I got an IUD.
My history with hormonal birth control is pretty extensive and not particularly positive. I’ve done time in the stirrups in order to get a prescription in four different countries, and the language barriers were nothing compared to the vagaries of four different health systems and four different systems of medical-cultural knowledge about oral contraceptives.
I’ve tried a whole lot of pills. Some were expensive, some were free. (Thanks, New Zealand health-care system!) On one, I’d get a nasty yeast infection every time I got my period. It took me almost the duration of my prescription to figure out the pill was the cause, because nobody had warned me of that side effect. (It’s a common one. This is why it’s important for women to talk each other about our health.) As far as I was concerned, the bare minimum in cool pill features was the ability to skip my periods. One wouldn’t let me do that! Another pill gave me bad skin. Another, weight gain. Another, migraines. I tried Ortho Tri-Cyclen, Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, Mercilon, something weird and Swiss — and I’m probably forgetting a couple. On all of them, I experienced a loss of sex drive — a dramatic and unwanted, though admittedly effective, way of preventing pregnancy. My desire to continue taking the pill — for its reliability, for its ease, for its invisibility, for all the reasons that made its development a victory for the human race and the most popular contraceptive choice of women the world over — eventually crumbled because of my body’s rebellion. I didn’t need to find “the right” pill; I needed something else entirely. Something without hormones. And so I turned to the IUD.
The IUD is the only long-term contraceptive method that has no artificial hormones. It’s a small, copper-wrapped device in the shape of a capital T that sits inside the uterus and prevents babies from happening. Copper-only IUDs can last up to 10 years (but you’ll menstruate, sometimes heavier than you did without it). A related device, a hormonal IUD which contains copper plus a low dose of slow-release artificial progesterone that the device delivers right to your uterus, lasts up to 5 years and will give you shorter, less painful periods (if you had pain with your period before, anyhow). IUDs need to be inserted and removed by a gynecologist. They are more effective than the pill, because you, the user, don’t have to remember to do anything with them but check once a month for the monofilament strings (like fishing line) that dangle out through your cervix, just to make sure your IUD is still in place.
Getting a doctor who would give me, a childless and never-pregnant woman, an IUD took some wrangling. An entire generation of American medical professionals were made suspicious of IUDs thanks to an intra-uterine device manufactured in the U.S. in the 70s called the Dalkon Shield, which caused 17 deaths, many life-threatening infections, and was the subject of a notorious class-action lawsuit. (I would actually encourage anyone interested in getting an IUD to read up on this history, if only to understand the differences between this early device and modern IUDs, and to better understand the resistance many medical practitioners of that generation still have to IUDs, especially for younger patients. The best coverage I have yet read of the bloody scandal in the U.S. is this 1976 story by Mark Dowie and Tracy Johnston. And this 1979 one by Barbara Ehrenreich covers how after the Dalkon Shield was taken off the market in the U.S., the dangerous devices were dumped on the Third World where they killed many more women. Both articles are from Mother Jones.) The main problem with the Dalkon — its wicking strings were a built-in vector of infection that caused many women to develop Pelvic Inflammatory Disease — has been resolved with modern IUDs, making them a safe and effective birth control option.
I had one doctor, a middle-aged woman, flat-out refuse my request. She said that an IUD was a good choice for women who had already completed their families but who did not want a tubal ligation — and only those women. But really, it makes no sense to deny young women the option of an IUD. With the average age of first sexual intercourse hovering around 16, and the average age of first childbirth now in the late 20s throughout most of the developed world, young women are the cohort most in need of a long-lasting and highly reliable method of contraception. If I could have had my IUD inserted at age 19 or 20, rather than continuing a fruitless search for the pill that would suit me, I’d have saved myself more than a few migraines.
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