Free In Our Control by Laura Eldridge

Foreword
by Jennifer Baumgardner
    When it comes to birth control, I fear I’m like an ostrich—I long ago stuck my head in the sand. You’d think I would have faced up to it by now. I’m a feminist who was raised on Our Bodies, Ourselves . I’m thirty-nine, I have two kids, and I don’t think I want more. I live with my second son’s father and have sex a few times a week. All that is good.
    The problem is I have always been intimidated by my birth control options. Thus, I have often avoided using anything to prevent pregnancy. In the two decades in which I’ve had sex, I spent six years with two girlfriends. During the other fourteen years with men, I was often frustrated with erection-deflating condoms, scary IUDs, and the nausea-inducing birth control pill. Sometimes I look at the array of birth control devices available and think, “Hand me my rabbit pearl.” I’m not alone in wondering if masturbation beats sex, all things considered. All of my straight female friends fantasize about better birth control. My friend Christine used to fetishize “the shot” (Depo-Provera)—“Three times a year! You get it and forget it!”—but then she learned that the side effects were atrocious and, further bummer, Depo often didn’t work. Many have dreamed a nasty feminist dream about a male pill, but few of those women would trust a guy to take it. My sister uses condoms, but she claims it’s because she rarely has intercourse. “Why take a pill all month for that one time you’re going to have sex?” she asks. “I wish I were kidding.”
    To be honest, I never found a contraceptive method that satisfied my contraceptive and sexual needs, and I never found a feminist guide that inspired me to make that search a priority. Until now.
    Laura Eldridge is young, savvy, and smart. She worked intimately for most of the past decade with Barbara Seaman, the pioneering women’s health activist. Seaman (who married into her last name but knew it was perfect for a health journalist writing about birth control) was a thirty-something mother of three in 1968 when she discovered, via her columnat Ladies’ Home Journal , that women were suffering terrible, often fatal, side effects to the original high-dose Pill. Several pathbreaking books (including The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill) and campaigns against drug companies later, Barbara succeeded in getting birth control pills to carry warning labels and making the Federal Drug Administration accept input from patients as part of the drug’s regulation. She came into my life when she swept into the offices of Ms . magazine. Within months of meeting her, I was off the Pill. In Our Control makes me see that my ceasing to take the Pill isn’t where I should stop—it’s just the beginning of figuring out how to find birth control that works for me.
    The trouble with most advice out there for women and girls about preventing pregnancy and STIs is that the “experts” never give the full picture, and they don’t take into consideration the unique situation every unique woman is in. Contraception is not a one-size-fits-all scenario. It is about options. There are many, and they all have their triumphs and caveats, and each woman needs to figure out what works best for her in her current sexual life. The message of In Our Control is an important one: there is an option out there for you, and your best option might change throughout your life. This book sets out to keep women in control of their sexual health by equipping them with all the information they need and trusting them to make their own decisions.
    Yet, In Our Control does more than just offer a survey of contraceptive choices. It brings us into the fascinating history behind this hot topic. Laura Eldridge traces the historical and political roots and ramifications of birth control development, noting how times of social power for women are often met by hostility to birth control, and how middle class and rich women