Periods Suck, Birth Control’s Important, and Women Deserve Chocolate

This post was published on October 26, 2017 on my old blog, samplesizedwriting.wordpress.com

Hey guys, I'm back to complain. And I'm here to complain about periods and the lack of concern for a woman's right to proper healthcare in this country.

Now, I know all (or at least most of) you girls will relate, but before any guys exit out of this post because periods scare you or you're like "Girl stuff, I don't care," hold it right there. Because odds are, you guys all have female relatives, female friends, or girlfriends, and they ALL have periods, and at least some of them probably have really sucky periods. So take this post as a lesson.

First things first, my periods absolutely suck. I get terrible cramps, and I mean terrible. They can literally be crippling. Don't believe me? HA, have I got stories for you.

The first year I started working at Putt U, my local hometown mini golf course, I had to call my mom and ask her to leave work to take me home from a shift because my cramps left me literally incapable of moving. I was out picking up course trash during a really hot day, and it was one of the first times I was working with one of my male coworkers. In the middle of one of the courses, I was in so much pain I had to sit down on the sidewalk and I physically could not get up. A random mother had to go get the guy I was working with to come help me back into our building, and I just sat on a chair and waited for my mom to leave work so she could take me home. It was so embarrassing, but I physically could not work so what could I do?

Another, more recent, story was from this summer. I was attending a relative's baby shower, trying to suffer through cramps and spend time with a ton of my extended family, but it got to a point where I was so uncomfortable and in so much pain that I had to leave early so I could go lay on my bed with my heating pad for hours. Sucks, right?

And just a few days ago I had seriously painful cramps that left me incapable of going to my evening class and relatively incapable of focusing on my homework or studying for an exam because the pain was so bad.

When I get terrible cramps, pain meds usually don't help, so I'm left lying in my bed with a heating pad and praying that they'll eventually go away. But cramps is not the only sucky symptom I get (lucky me). When I get terrible cramps, they're usually accompanied by extreme nausea and dizziness/lightheadedness (which may honestly be a result of me not eating or drinking because I get so nauseous, but oh well). The lightheadedness can be a REAL bitch, especially if I'm in the shower or something, because if I pass out in a locked bathroom (like I totally thought I was going to the other night), who would know? And if I cracked my head on the floor or something, I could be in real trouble.

Now, I'm not only writing this to complain about my own periods. I'm writing because having really painful periods is a problem many women have (in fact, more than half of women who have periods experience at least one or two days of pain during their cycle), but is a problem that's not often talked about. Periods are something women are just expected to deal with since it's "natural," but sometimes they're really hard to deal with.

Yet, a lot of guys in this world don't get it. They think girls are being overdramatic and girls on their periods are often joked about. And a lot of those same guys are the guys who are policing our bodies and deciding how important birth control is.

See ladies, we know birth control is important, but guys may not. Not only does it prevent pregnancies, a true blessing for women who super don't want that in their lives yet, but it makes our periods way easier to handle. Multiple methods of birth control can reduce menstrual pain (the main reason I'm trying to get on birth control ASAP).

It also makes periods more regular (and lighter and shorter), which is honestly such a help. Sometimes it seems like the wind blowing the wrong way can throw off your cycle, and that's sorta true. Weight loss or gain, sickness, stress, even travel can cause a woman to have a late or missed period. Come on, we're meant to be evolved creatures and yet my body can freak out and miss a period if I catch a cold in the middle of my cycle? Birth control evens all that out, making women have periods regularly (or not at all, depending on the kind of birth control you're taking).

Birth control is also proven to help clear up acne (God bless, because even though acne is a super normal and common problem, nobody wants a zit), lower the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer, ease symptoms of endometriosis and PCOS, and decrease migraines. Let's be real, birth control is a gift bestowed upon women so we can suffer less in this crappy, misogynistic world.

AND YET, the men of this world work ridiculously hard to make birth control as inaccessible to women as they can.

Recently, the Trump administration announced they would roll back Obama-era birth control regulations so employers would not have to include birth control in their health insurance plans if it somehow infringed on the employer's or organization's religious and/or moral beliefs. The administration also gave other reasons for rolling back the mandate, saying birth control's “positive health effects might also be partially offset by an association with negative health effects” and the mandate could promote “risky sexual behavior” among teens and young adults.

Let me preface this rant with the fact that I think Trump and all his white rich goons are the worst things to happen to our government during my life so far for a number of reasons. SO, learning that they further want to police women's bodies by making it easier for employers to deny women birth control (and therefore harder and more expensive for women to access it), really got my panties in a twist.

I've already been denied birth control coverage by my past health insurance provider because it came through the Catholic diocese, who wholeheartedly disagrees with covering it. (I truly don't understand why, because yeah it makes it really hard for a woman to get pregnant when she's on it, but that doesn't mean she's automatically going out and having premarital sex. Many women, myself included, want/need it for actual medical reasons. AND, if the Catholic Church is against abortions, shouldn't they be for medicine that will cut down on abortion rates anyways??) Being denied coverage sucked, and as a college student who has to pay her own way 99.9% of the time, shelling out a minimum of $60/month on pills isn't ideal. And I would never be able to afford the method I actually wanted, the implant they put in your arm, because it was close to $1000 without insurance coverage.

Now hopefully my family's new insurance plan will cover at least some of the cost of birth control, but with the Trump administration's new guidelines, any company or organization could decide that providing birth control is against their religious or moral beliefs and just write it out of their plans, pretty much without any approval from the government or the people the company's/organization's plans cover. That is ridiculous. Women go on birth control for 100% legitimate medical reasons! It's a medicine! By denying birth control coverage you're denying a woman's ability to get the proper healthcare she needs, and that is sexist and anti-progressive.

As for the other nonsensical reasons the Trump administration offered for rolling back the birth control mandate, I call bullshit. They used absolutely 0 scientific proof to back up their reasonings.

Let's begin by attacking the “positive health effects might also be partially offset by an association with negative health effects” line. First of all, every medication on the market has potentially negative side effects, even the Tylenol Trump breaks out of his medicine cabinet when his toupee's on too tight and it's giving him a headache. Second of all, it is proven that the benefits of birth control vastly outweigh the the potential negative effects, so much so that it's been recommended birth control be a required preventative health service for women.

The Trump administration also cites research suggesting that birth control pills increase the risk of deep vein thrombosis (blood clotting for all you folks like me who had no idea what that meant). BUT, what they didn't say was that women have a greater risk of blood clotting when they're pregnant than they do when they're on the pill. Interesting how they leave out hard scientific facts that don't make them look too good, huh?

Now, let's attack my favorite reason the Trump administration gave for rolling back the Obama-era birth control mandate: it could promote “risky sexual behavior” among teens and young adults. For those who are a bit unclear on what the Trump administration means, they're saying access to birth control encourages women to have more sex.

Before I go off on an opinionated tangent, there is research to prove that this is not at all the case. A study from the CHOICE Project, out of Washington University in St. Louis, found that most women reported no change in their number of sexual partners after gaining access to free birth control. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (a survey that's been tracking the sex lives of teenagers since the 90s) have found that teenagers are actually less sexually active now than they were a few years ago, before the Obamacare mandate. 

Now that I've gotten cold, hard facts out of the way, here's my opinion: the sex lives of women are not any Republican's business and should not be policed. There is no law saying women shouldn't have sex, so why is that incorporated into the reasoning for changing a policy? This is the twenty-first century. Women should be allowed to sleep with who they please, when they please, and how often they please, without the government having ANY sort of say in the matter, and they should be allowed to do that without having to fear any biological consequences. Free condoms get handed out to guys all the time, and Viagra is covered by health insurance (yes, the meds that pretty much only serve to give guys erections so they can have sex). Why are guys being told to go out and have all the sex they want, but women should only have sex when they are married and trying to have children??

I'll tell you why: because our country is run by men and our society is a misogynistic one.

Access to proper women's healthcare is not a major concern of our lawmakers. Currently, it seems the theme of the Trump administration is greed and anti-progression. Literally every law Obama made in his eight years of presidency in the name of progression has been rewritten, rolled back, or completely tossed out in the last 10 months (yes, only 10 months) of Trump's presidency. And if any laws have so far remained untouched, don't worry, I'm sure the Republicans can't wait to get their greedy mitts on those, too. They're not doing anything to make our country great, all they're doing is making it great for them. (And to try and re-inflate their egos since they hated Obama and were pissed he was even breathing in the White House, let alone actually passing laws that the general public approved of.)

And a way they're making it great for them is to stomp all over women's healthcare, since 90% of them aren't women and don't give a shit.

Now that I described why periods absolutely suck and have hated on the Trump administration and their policies, I will end with this: women put up with a lot of nonsense. They have periods every month, and periods suck. A lot. A lot of women try to make their periods better through methods of birth control, but our government is really trying to stop that for their own nonsensical reasoning. That sucks. Women are just trying to get through life happy and healthy, but we go through a lot of nonsense in this world.

So when a girl you know is experiencing painful cramps or is uncomfortable because of her period or is just having a really rough day and says she needs chocolate, go get it for her. She deserves it.