Tag Archives: failure

Lucky Girl

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The following guest post comes to us from Dr. Monica J. Casper, a sociologist, women’s health advocate, and creative writer who lives in Tucson, Arizona. Monica served as a member of the Planned Parenthood Arizona, Inc., board from 2012 to 2013. You can learn more about her work at www.monicajcasper.com.

ChicagoI want to tell you a love story.

A cautionary note: This is not the kind of tale you’re used to (or maybe it is?). There is no sweeping soundtrack, no Hollywood superstars falling blissfully in love onscreen, their whiter-than-white teeth dazzling a rapt audience. In this love story, there are no flowers, no sappy cards, no fairy tale endings with double rainbows and confetti.

This is not a romance.

But it is a story about people who love each other and the unexpected life choices we make. It is a memoir fragment about how some of us learn to map our uncertain futures in the warm clutch of parental benevolence. And maybe it is a ghost story, as well. The kind that haunts you, but also challenges you to imagine anew what you believe to be true and to reconsider who you believe you are, or will become.

***

The scene is Chicago, 1986, late July. It is hot, sticky, and intolerable, not even a whisper of cooling lake breeze. This is a typical sweltering summer day in my hometown.

Our whole lives unfurl before us, lives whose shape and direction we have not yet begun to fully imagine.

I fidget impatiently on the stoop of my parents’ basement apartment on the city’s North Side. They have recently sold our house in Wisconsin and moved back to the city to be closer to their work and my grandmother. Our house in the country now belongs to another family, farm people who have migrated off the land to live in town, and we are again urban dwellers. I have urgent news for my mom, who should be home any minute. I crack my knuckles and stretch my arms above my head.

What is taking her so long?

I stand up, needing to move. Concrete blisters my bare feet and sweat pools in my armpits as I pace nervously. Cars zip by on Fullerton Avenue and I am reminded of childhood, playing Kick the Can and Stranger Danger in the city’s gritty, familiar streets and alleyways. I am 19 now, not so many years older than when I patrolled the neighborhood with my sassy friends wearing bell-bottoms and halter-tops, owning the world. Continue reading →

Let’s Talk Contraception: How Effective Is My Birth Control?

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According to the Guttmacher Institute, 62 percent of women of child-bearing age (roughly 15 to 44 years of age) currently use a contraceptive method. Most contraceptive users are married and on average would like to have two children. This means that a woman might be using a contraceptive method for more than 30 years.

Studies have calculated that if a sexually active woman is not using any contraceptive method, over the course of a year she has an 85 percent chance of becoming pregnant. Using contraceptives greatly decreases this chance, but there are still some possibilities that her contraceptive method could fail to prevent pregnancy.

To maximize your contraception’s effectiveness, use it as correctly and consistently as possible.

When choosing a contraceptive method, you might want to use the safest and most reliable method available. How likely is it that your choice could fail? With the many types of birth control at your disposal, how do you know which is most effective? And why, with even the most effective contraception around, do women still have unintended pregnancies?

If we rank birth control methods according to most effective to the least effective, how do they compare? How is effectiveness measured?  Continue reading →