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Copyright © 2010 Andrea Langworthy
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Happy 50th birthday to the pill. The tiny tablet that changed women’s lives. Even those whose religion forbade its use. From its inception, the birth control pill was panned by those who protested it would lead to sex outside marriage, multiple partners, a decline in morality. Catholic priests said married or not, any form of birth control besides rhythm or abstinence would always be a sin. As a young Catholic woman, I’d heard negative rumblings about the pill; rumors about someone’s parents’ friend, a Catholic doctor, who’d gotten pills for his married daughter. When she wanted to start a family, the woman miscarried and it was said she might never be able to have a child. Gosh! I didn’t want that to happen to me. I’d chosen names for my children while I was still in high school; writing them over and over on my class notebooks along with Mrs. Andrea So-and-so, the last name of my sweetheart.
My sweetheart and I had been married less than a year when we found out we were expecting. Barely 19, I was working as a file clerk for an insurance company and he was a student at the University who worked part-time. Even though we could hardly afford to eat, we were excited to be having a baby. We’d talked about it often and always knew it would be the next step after marriage. But when our daughter was born, we realized it would be a good idea to put some time and space between the two children we hoped to have. There was a house to buy. He had to finish school. So, six weeks after our baby’s birth, I returned to my doctor’s office for a follow-up visit. I asked him about the pill I’d heard so much about. He was part of the same obstetrical group who delivered my mother’s five children and the six born to my mother-in-law. Like every doctor at the clinic, he was a Catholic. His tone of voice left no room for discussion. It would be a sin for him to write a prescription for birth control until I had permission from my parish priest.
A year later, when my husband and I put down money to buy a brand new split-entry home in Apple Valley, the builder sent us to a lending institution in downtown Minneapolis. We filled out forms and waited to speak to a loan officer. He explained that, based on our income and the fact that my spouse was still in school, the bank would require a letter from my doctor stating that I was taking the birth control pill. We never bought that house. Not because of the letter or even finances. We got frightened by our fathers who thought Apple Valley was the end of the world; maybe another planet. They felt a tiny house in a brand new subdivision was a bad investment. One pointed out our double bed would never fit in the small master bedroom. Ah, the bed. The culprit that made me to lie to my doctor about having permission from my priest to take the pill. That bed and I were co-conspirators.