As I lie back across the thin blue paper runway, my legs open, an Anglepoise lamp shining into the abyss, my nurse (called, ironically, Comfort) warns: “This may be a little uncomfortable.” Oh how we laughed. But I was determined – I wanted a coil.
According to reports, in the first week after the US election, Planned Parenthood (which Donald Trump, vice president Mike Pence, and House speaker Paul Ryan all want to stop funding, by the way) saw a 900% increase in patients seeking IUDs. As the news that Trump was to nominate “women’s health opponent” Tom Price for secretary of health and human services fell across America like sleet, women, nurses and healthworkers took to social media advising one simple thing: get a coil.
It builds on an existing trend for American women to choose intrauterine devices. Under Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, insurance providers are required to cover a woman’s birth-control method of choice for free; usually this costs about $ 1,000 for insertion and follow-up visits. For the first time, the IUD was affordable, as well as reliable. And so, according to US Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), IUD use increased 83% comparing 2006–2010 with 2011–2013. In an anti-abortion, pussy-grabbing climate, American women have been backed into a corner and the IUD seems, at the moment, like their last form of defence.
Coils give us hormone-free control over our wombs and, therefore, lives
Nearly 10 years ago, I had my very own little hammerhead shark of copper wire inserted into my uterus. It would do nothing to protect against sexually transmitted infections, I knew; it might make my periods heavier, I understood; having it put in might make me wince, I’d been told. But, my god, it was better than the alternatives. Even in this new millennium I couldn’t rely on men to carry, let alone use, condoms. And while on the pill I had cried, almost continuously, for three months. Sex wasn’t just off the menu – my body felt like a bovine mass of lustless, listless despair. In that way, the contraception was working brilliantly – I was about as likely to want sex as I was to take up a laboratory position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That the source of my sadness could be linked to the galloping horse-sized quantity of hormones running through my bloodstream didn’t occur to me for longer than I care to admit. But when it did, the solution seemed as clear as it did to that tweeting nurse in Colorado: get your IUD.
As Vicky Spratt of The Debrief has written for their new Mad About The Pill campaign, the link between the contraceptive pill and mental health problems is still just anecdotal. But by god the anecdotes are there. According to the site’s survey of 1,022 women, 46% reported that the pill had decreased their sex drive, 45% said that they believed they had experienced anxiety, 45% said they had experienced depression and 20% reported experiencing panic attacks which they attributed to their hormonal contraception. If we were in America, we’d have had to pay for the pleasure of this troublesome medicine. So no wonder so many of us are looking into alternatives.
The copper coil didn’t make me weep uncontrollably with the curtains closed, it didn’t turn my tits into bricks and I never had to panic that I’d left it at home. You do not forget about your coil and then have to seek emergency contraception; you can keep the same coil in for up to 10 years, which means you can be miles from a chemist, in another country, or simply at work and never have to worry. It will not tear while fumbling in the gloom of your parents’ spare room; it won’t get punctured by the keys in your pocket; you don’t have to pay £2 in a pub toilet for it and, in my case at least, it didn’t hurt.
Coils give us hormone-free control over our wombs and, therefore, lives. On the downside they do nothing to protect against STIs and there are, of course, women who suffer serious side-effects – heavy or irregular periods, damage to the womb, pelvic infections, ectopic pregnancies. But the coil still deserves to move away from the icky, scary reputation it had when our mothers were sleeping around.
Of course I find it exasperating, frustrating, maddening and saddening that the burden of not getting pregnant still falls almost entirely on women. Many men will still assume that she “has it covered”; many still squirm away from condoms; some seem entirely unaware of what sperm may do. It’s 2017, for Christ’s sake – and yet, I know firsthand that many women are expected to be magically infertile right up until the moment their partner wants a baby. And, should that woman want to get pregnant earlier? Well then, of course, the question of coming off contraception must be a joint one. He must have his say. If he’s not ready then you cannot push it on him. If you do, you are branded selfish and controlling.
When it comes to our bodies, we carry all the responsibility; but not quite all of the power. But, perhaps, the coil can help claim some back.
The coil isn’t just a great contraceptive, it’s a form of resistance for US women | Nell Frizzell
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