OK, maybe this story is not quite so shocking as this image suggests. This is a post I've thought about off and on for almost two years. I'm in a committed relationship, (married even!) and my husband and I  have discovered the coolest contraption. It's a computer with a thermometer and an alarm clock built into it, and every morning, it tells me if I can conceive a child that day. I discovered it through another blog (which seems to have disappeared or I would link it here), and my doctor had never heard of it. It is not covered by my insurance, and we had to purchase it from a Canadian vendor.

We LOVE it.

I love it because I took birth control pills for years. I was such a good girl, I actually told my mom that I was thinking of having sex before I had any! So, she took me to the doctor to get me a prescription for birth control, like the heroic progressive mom she was. I have no complaints about that experience, and I feel really lucky that no one ever treated me like deciding to have sex was bad (well, except for my Grandparents, but that's a story for another time!). I started when I was 18. When I got to college, I got packs from the university's student pharmacy for about $20 apiece. This number crept up inexorably and eventually, it was beyond what we could afford. I started going to Planned Parenthood for my pills, in the middle of Austin, Texas. I had wonderful experiences with the women there, and their pills at that time were still subsidized by the government. Sometimes you could even get them for free.

And this whole time, I loved them. I loved them because they killed my cramps and evened out my very irregular (seeming) cycle. I loved the predictability of them, and I took them religiously, like my life depended on it. I ignored the weight I gained. What really bothered me though, were all the studies that started getting published, that attributed growing levels of hormones in various water supplies to birth control pills.

I was angry about those stories. What was I supposed to do? Not have sex until I was married and wanted kids? Not take birth control? I hated the idea of unconsciously littering just for a little nookie... how was this better than the kids who left their condoms in parks? And should I use condoms? Their failure rate wasn't substantially different from other methods, but being noticeably lower was enough to scare me away from them.

Were IUDs better? What kinds of options did I have? I tried a NuvaRing for a while, but it had truly scary warnings in the disposal instructions because it too, was liable to leach out hormones after I was done using it. After all, that's what it was designed to do. How would a piece of plastic know when I need it to quit?

This was all floating around in my head for the past 10 years as I continued to take the pills. Over the last two recessions, we lost and regained health care coverage a few times. Spotty coverage resulted in spotty prescription filling. Eventually, I was off birth control pills. Eventually, we were using condoms. As we used them, I wondered why I'd ever balked at that choice, because they genuinely seemed to work.

But my husband hated them. Not that he complained or anything, but I could tell he missed having sex without them. There had to be some solution that wouldn't make the two of us feel like we were missing out.

Enter the LadyComp. I discovered it in June of 2007. The price was a little intimidating, but the more I read about it, the more intrigued I became. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of knowing what my body was doing instead of forcing it to trick itself throughout the year. So we bought one. Ours was in the neighborhood of $500... or about the cost of 2 years of birth control pills at the price I was paying in college. I was paying as much as $40 for a pack, even on insurance, so I'm pretty sure we've recouped the cost by now. This model should last 10 years according to the warranty, so that's looking pretty attractive from a financial standpoint.

But the real benefits are not financial. Birth control pills are meant for something really specific: controlling births. Yes, for some women they can stabilize moods and pacify cramps and clear up acne and do any number of other things, but I didn't appreciate the way I piled on pounds because of them. There were other side effects that I liked even less. I didn't like the idea that my sex-life was worth polluting rivers and oceans and emasculating fish and otters. And now that I'm not on them, I especially don't like the idea of consuming a pill everyday when you're only able to conceive on 9 or 10 days out of the month, simply because you don't know which days they are. Knowledge about your own body is empowering, and I feel like I finally got something of an owner's manual. I only discovered it by accident after years of trying the options I was offered. It still doesn't seem to be covered by insurance here, and none of my doctors even seem to know it exists.

Those options never gave me as many insights into our relationship either. These days we have a stash of condoms (something neither of us worried about as teenagers or college students!) for the days the light is red.  And there's something special about those days the light is green (yup, it uses traffic light directions).  I'm grateful to finally be feeling the natural rhythms of my body throughout the month. I do admit I don't relish the cramps...

But for me at least, they're worth it.