The Pill and the Prayer
Getting back on hormonal birth control so my partner and I can stop using condoms, I pause before I pop the first tiny yellow pill. I light a candle in my heart and begin to pray.
A prayer of thanks for Obamacare and $0 copays. For Planned Parenthood. For every PP employee and volunteer who walks past the protesters every day because they know the work is vital. A prayer of peace and restoration for their exhausted spirits. For a former roommate whose job was to simply be there—hold their hand, distract them, talk with them, cry with them—for any patient undergoing an abortion alone.
A prayer of grief and remembrance for the Puerto Rican women in the initial drug trials: informed consent never fully given, symptoms dismissed, and three deaths uninvestigated. For the disabled women deemed unworthy of bodily autonomy and forced into sterilization. A prayer of strength for those protesting for the removal of statues of the butcher, the monster, “the father of modern gynecology.”
A prayer of grief for those struggling with infertility, who’ve survived miscarriages and stillbirths. A desperate wish that I could cut out my “functional” uterus and give it to someone who wants nothing more than to give birth. A prayer of thanks for my two perfect nieces and the miracle of adoption.
A prayer of joyous, rainbow-drenched thanks for all the QuILTBAG family who’ve expanded our archaic understandings of biological sex, sexuality, and gender. For all those who keep pushing for queer-inclusive sex ex, for pronouns and “name you go by” on patient intake forms. For trans men and AFAB enbies who silently tolerate being called “women” so they can get in, get the pill, and get out. For those who do not remain silent and remind us that not everyone with a uterus is a woman. A small, secret wish that someday I will have a partner who cannot possibly get me pregnant.
A prayer of—what, fear? Pleading? Fingers crossed?—that the combination of increased risk of blood clots from the pill and a family history of strokes will pass over me. A prayer of health and hope for free-flowing blood like rivers in the globe of my body. I swallow the tiny yellow pill, keep the candle in my heart lit, put on my compression socks, and go to work.
