first - and i’m just going to state this and move on - i’m against anything that attacks a woman’s right to reproductive freedom. i could talk for hours about how upset it makes me and how it reduces women to second class citizens (have you seen women present at the current discussions btw? i thought not.) but i’m actually planning on making a largely unrelated point.
and that is that birth control serves a myriad of purposes outside of its namesake. for instance, one of my best friends, who is not sexually active, is on birth control because she becomes severely depressed to the point of non-functionality when she is PMSing. similarly, as an anorexic, the only way that i have a period is from taking birth control. which is to say that right now, birth control is the only thing keeping me from being infertile, perhaps forever. i’m not saying this to complain about how dramatically my life would be effected without birth control, although of course it would be.
rather, i’d like to point out a larger problem, which is the way we often unknowingly stigmatize and trivialize the mentally ill. and no, doing so unknowingly isn’t better than being aware. because a lack of awareness reeks of privilege (which perhaps ties back into my first brief point) - being privileged has the ability to just ignore problems or to render them unimportant. this is also how stereotypes are formed. (the depressive is simply melodramatic; the anorexic is a vapid attention-seeker. why won’t they just get over it? it’s so weird!) i wish that others would try to look at the world from a perspective that isn’t their own. birth control is only a small slice in this pie, but it sure is a pertinent one. how many people is it okay to let suffer (through backwards policy, or simply through privileged neglect) in order to win a moral crusade?
