The Pill and its Discontents
“I’ve got 44-year-olds who show up in my office after trying two months and say, ‘I don’t understand, my gynecologist told me I was fine,’” says [Dr. Jamie] Grifo. “Now, he didn’t say, ‘You’re going to be fertile forever.’ But they didn’t hear that part . . . And for these women, if IVF doesn’t work, it’s very hard to recover. They have to grieve and mourn and make a life. These women, the 44-year-olds, are the ones that struggle the most, because they are so angry. And they’re angry at one person, but they won’t admit it. They’re angry at themselves.”
While waiting for the hour-plus-late New York-Boston train, I went to the newsstand and bought the latest issue of New York Magazine for its fascinating cover article, “Waking Up from the Pill.” Although most readers here won’t come to the same conclusions as its author, Vanessa Grigoriadis, most will agree with her that the Pill has greatly exacerbated female infertility and led to a great deal of heartbreak among women who delay childbearing in the interest of career ambitions and sexual freedom. Even to a pro-sex feminist like Grigoriadis, the Pill has emerged as a tool to control rather than empower women, with disturbing consequences.
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It’s an interesting article. But you’re right, I didn’t come to the same conclusions the author did. She states, “These days, women’s twenties are as free and fabulous as they can be, a time of boundless freedom and experimentation, of easily trying on and discarding identities, careers, partners.” And I’m thinking, maybe in her universe. In the one I live in, I see a lot of young 20-something women hooking up with losers they wouldn’t trust with their credit cards.
I hadn’t heard of FAM, which is apparently a secular version of NFP; some women have figured out that the pill does rob them of awareness of their natural body cycles. I think it’s good that there’s something out there like that for women who aren’t in the Catholic/Evangelical loop where you would get up-to-date information on NFP. I picked up a well-known womens’ magazine in the break room at work the other day. There was an article summarizing family planning methods. The directions for natural family planning were basically, “Don’t rely on it if you’re serious.” and then proceeded to give directions for the old 1950′-style calendar method. I thought it was an inexcusable lack of research; more scientific and accurate updates have been out there for 40 years.
“And I’m thinking, maybe in her universe. In the one I live in, I see a lot of young 20-something women hooking up with losers they wouldn’t trust with their credit cards.”
Zing! Yeah, I really don’t know too many people who have become adept at easily discarding partners who have healthy relationships with good long-term prospects. You can’t train yourself to use and be used and then expect happily ever after once you turn 33.
Amen.
The pill and abortion are the tools men use to exploit women and use them as toys for their sexual gratification.
Excellent article. It stimulates the question of what is the identity of a woman and who or what influences this identity. What was shown to me about 6 years ago when I returned to Catholicism after a 40 year absence was and is the fact that women are God’s Gift of Love to this world and their identity should start with that truth.
The pill and abortion are the tools men use to exploit women and use them as toys for their sexual gratification.
Isn’t this a little dismissive of the ability of women to think for themselves and act responsibly?
Behind every woman seeking an abortion or ABC there is a man telling her “just not now”, “the time is just not right” or “we need to time together”.
The notion that single women could and would want to lead their sexual lives like single men was popularized by the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan in the early 1960s, exploited by the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, and further embroidered upon in later cultural artifacts like Sex and the City. Nonetheless, I wonder how many young single women any of us might be able to drum up who actually want to live and have sex that way.
Odd that apparently so many people see goodness in a future where every 20-year-old deposits their eggs or sperm in a bank and then gets sterilized, withdrawing their genetic material later when they decide they want to reproduce.
It seems more likely that the demographic choosing to behave this way will diminish to statistical insignificance in a hundred years or so.