Single, pregnant and panicked
Why so many smart women botch their birth control
The majority of unplanned pregnancies and abortions occur among women in their 20s, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy in Washington, D.C.
A friend sent this yesterday. I can't tell my personal story about having an unwanted, disaster pregnancy because I have never had one or been involved with one. Although because of a friend's lie about a girl I was dating at 16, I thought for most of one day that I might have been.
The most uncomfortable day of my life to that point.
The evening began in Chicago at Bin 36, the wine bar that had become Kortney Peagram’s favorite retreat from her merciless workdays. There, over red wine and plates of hummus and pita, she met up with a college buddy in town on business. A portfolio manager at a consulting firm, Peagram, 28, crammed her schedule, leading management-training sessions, teaching at a local university and in her spare time prepping for a marathon. In quiet moments, her mind drifted to an upcoming European ski trip.
Peagram had just gone through a bitter breakup. On that winter night more than a year ago, unloading on an old friend felt good. A few glasses into the evening, her friend confessed that he worried his recent wedding had been a mistake. "I told him it was first-year-marriage syndrome," Peagram says. She offered him some armchair psychoanalysis, and talk turned back to old times. "What did I do?" he asked. "Why didn’t we date? I just realized you are the one girl I always had fun with."
Well, right here I can tell you, this sounds like trouble. Booze and an old friend in an unhappy marriage. Trouble, trouble, boil and bubble. Sounds like a serious witch's brew. Truly, sometimes too much to drink just isn't enough.
Peagram blushed. To break up the awkwardness, she ordered another round. Before she knew it, they were kissing. "He went from friend to lover over intoxication," she says. "I made a stupid judgment call."
She opened her eyes at daybreak to sheets so radioactively white they could only be hotel linens. "My mind started racing," she recalls. "I’m not on the Pill. We hadn’t used a condom. What am I going to do?" She had stopped using birth control pills after her last relationship. She wasn’t having sex; plus, she liked not having to remember to take them.
As an obgyn who has provided birth control and abortion as routine parts of my regular obgyn practice for more years than I care to remember, I can't tell you haw many times I have heard this story: "I wasn't having sex, so I stopped my pills since I didn't need to take them." Once a girl or woman has started having coitus, she is extremely unlikely to cease for any considerable length of time. The average drunken woman, if she has the necessary female genitalia, will be just the "sweetthang" some other drunk is looking for.
She stared at her friend’s naked back; he was still lightly snoring. "I had to figure out what I was going to do before he woke up," she says. She was mortified at having slept with a married man and decided the two should never speak of it.
Despite her panic, it was three days before Peagram could get to the pharmacy for the "morning after" pill, which is most effective when taken within 72 hours. A couple of weeks later, while visiting the doctor for a previously scheduled Pap smear, she had the clinic run a pregnancy test, and it came out negative. But before long, she missed a couple of periods and pregnant from one night of desperation sex.
Here, some blame can by applied to the physician ordering the test. Any physician ordering a test under these circumstances should inform the patient that any negative test done this soon after coitus may not be accurate and should be repeated in another week or two.
"On some days she woke to bone-splitting fatigue. Still, the symptoms were easy to rationalize for a sworn vegan training for a marathon. She regressed into weeks of thinking like a teenager, telling herself there was no way the test could have been wrong; she couldn’t possibly be. "On my vacation, I missed my third period," she says. "In my heart, I knew I was pregnant." That wasn’t her only problem. One of her sisters, who was collecting Peagram’s mail while she was away, phoned Switzerland; a letter had arrived telling Peagram she had lost her job at the consulting firm.
The day she returned to Chicago, Peagram took a home pregnancy test. She was crying even before she went into the bathroom. She saw the lines: positive. Definitely pregnant. "I believed if I stared at the stick long enough and kept crying, the result would change," she recalls. She frantically drove from drugstore to drugstore, buying three more tests from three different locations, too embarrassed to hand more than one box at a time to the cashier. Each test gave the same answer.
This is so common as well. Why it is so difficult to believe a positive test and yet so easy to accept a negative test in the face of so many symptoms of pregnancy should be a mystery, but it is not. None of us wants to accept bad news as true until it has been confirmed and reconfirmed.
For some women, surprise motherhood ends up being the blessing of a lifetime. Others choose abortion (most often) with no regrets. But the high rate of unintended pregnancy remains distressing, Kulkarni says, because "it suggests that women are not as in control of their sexuality and childbearing as we would hope."
I tell my birth control patients and abortion patients a dozen times a day that Mother Nature does her best to best her pregnent. And she has to do her best to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. And sometimes, like the poet said, "the best laid plans of mice and men (and this includes women) often go awry."
I have had a patient whose husband had three vasectomies and she had two tubal ligations who came in terribly distraught, requesting an abortion. I know of one patient who had a hysterectomy and came in with an ectopic pregnancy a few months later. That's just plain bad luck!
When I was 16, a friend in trying to get me to admit that I was having sex with a girl friend told me that the rumor floating around our very small town was that she was pregnant and I was the father. Like the former president, I lied to my friend to the effect that "I have not had sex with that woman!"
As soon as I got home that afternoon, after I bathed, I went over to ask my girlfriend about the supposed rumor. She denied it immediately, in fact, she said, she was having her period at the time. I had a great feeling of relief, so great in fact, that we immediately had sex! And neither of us drank. And we were lucky. Our only method of birth control at that time was condoms. At this late date I can't remember if I used a condom. But I am quite sure I did, because I knew if I got a girl pregnant, I would be getting married. And even as stupid as I was as a 16 old boy with an erection, I knew this would be a disaster for my plans for the rest of my life. Which at that time may have been no more than to have sex with as many girls as I could!