The following post comes to us via Ava Budavari-Glenn, a political communications major and a nonprofit communications minor who is entering her sophomore year at Emerson College. She is a writer whose work focuses mainly on advocacy, and a community organizer who has worked for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns. She is a media and communications intern at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona.
As many of you reading this blog post probably already know, birth control is not “optional” health care. It is not a bartering chip, nor is it something our society can do without. It is a needed part of health care, just like any other medication.
Rarely does the birth control conversation extend far beyond pregnancy prevention. But actually, what birth control does for women has a far wider reach, because birth control empowers us to live our own lives, exercise bodily autonomy, and have a choice over what the future looks like for us, in more ways than one. I know firsthand how birth control can do that.
Everyone deserves bodily autonomy.
Because birth control gave me my life back.
Growing up, periods were something nobody really talked about with me. There was just a set of norms I had to face. Your period was never something you talked about above a whisper, or through the use of code names that no male around you was supposed to understand. If you leaked blood through the pad, you were supposed to find a way to hide it and not tell anyone, because it would be shameful if anyone around you knew you were menstruating.
I had grown up with other aspects of my body being sexualized by people around me (breasts, hips, really any new curves that suddenly showed up), but this was a different kind of shame. My period was gross. The time of the month where I bled suddenly made me disgusting, even though it was a normal part of growing up. Stereotypes of women having their periods as being bitchy, having mood swings, screaming in pain, or something for people to stay away from because it was that “time of the month again,” suddenly applied to me. So I just learned not to talk about it, and hide it as best as I could. Continue reading