So - second piece of my history. I was one of the first who was prescribed The Pill for safe, effective contraception. I married at 18 and still wanted to attend college and my doctor told me about the pill. What none of us knew then was that the first generation of the pill was much stronger than it needed to be. Ergo: I was sick. I would go to wedding showers and ask if I could lie down. Someone even commented that I didn’t seem too happy about getting married. And of course we didn’t talk about it. I and everyone around me would have been shocked if I had said, “Oh, no, I’m very excited. I’ve just started on The Pill and am having some side effects.” I mean that would have acknowledged I was going to have sex after I got married.
Well, for all the mystique surrounding it then, the pill did its job and my generation became the first to really have a choice about when we had children. I took the pill, finished my BA, went off the pill and had my first child eleven months later. One with my MA, one with my PhD studies. A planned family. And now it is all so ordinary that I know school teachers who plan the birth of their children during spring or summer breaks. We’ve come a long way.
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