options

As many of you know, I’ve partnered with birthcontrolforme.com this year for a series of posts about #3YearGoals and birth control education + options. Perhaps not the fashion-related content you’re used to, but something that I think is important for women everywhere. For the final post of this series, I was provided with a list of milestones in the history of birth control, and I was genuinely astounded reading through the dates provided. Read on.

First of all, I was shocked by the fact that birth control was decriminalized in Canada in 1969… Are you kidding me?! That is not a long time ago; that’s within our mothers’ lifetimes (for most of us)! For a fashion correlate, consider this 60’s look on the left, and a picture of me this month. This is recent, people! It’s literally crazy to think that when people were wearing bell bottoms, birth control was illegal.

Possibly more so than fashion, the landscape of birth control has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. But in the same way that fashion trends are not for everyone, not every birth control option is perfect for every woman. Every woman has a different style when it comes to fashion, lifestyle, career, partners, and all other manner of big life decisions. And what bigger a decision is there than family planning? A study by Singh et al. in 2010 found that 48% of North American pregnancies were unintended. That’s a lot. Statistically, if you have one sibling… flip a coin.

Enter 2016, and we have options. Not just, like, one or two options. Dozens. Are you a Forgetful Francine? Try long-acting non-daily. Are you a Sqeamish Sally? No IUD for you. Are you a Pill-hating Patricia? Try the Nuva ring.

This sounds like the worst ad campaign of all time (and to be honest I’m just enjoying alliterating names + birth control choices), but my point is that birth control, like fashion, is great because you’re in charge. Imagine your only fashion choice for the rest of your life was one colour, one piece, one pair of shoes, one dress. It would be a disaster (unless it was all black, which I could live with). Having options means having freedom and flexibility.

The bulk of my readers are women of reproductive age, here for fashion advice and maybe the occasional lifestyle or beauty tip. I wrote about this topic today because it’s important to me, and I suspect it’s very important to you. There are a million great things about being a woman, and today I wanted to shed light on one of the things that’s made it a little easier for us than for our mothers and grandmothers.

Photos by Nathalie Martin
Shot in collaboration with Bayer