Unprotected Sex

Four years ago, I was sitting in my apartment when my phone started going off.

Roe v. Wade was gone.

I burst into tears. Not the gentle kind, but the kind that comes from violation, from something being done to your body without your consent. It felt like an assault. Like a decision being made about my most private self by strangers in robes who would never have to live inside the consequences.

I knew that feeling. I had felt it before. In a different context. In a different room. The specific helplessness of something happening to your body that you did not consent to and cannot stop.

Two months after Donald Trump first took office in 2016, I got an IUD. So did a lot of women. We were all doing the same math simultaneously, alone, in our own bathrooms and doctors’ offices and bedrooms. We were looking at the political horizon and making a calculation about our own bodies before someone else made it for us. That is what women do. We plan around the threat.

I kept that IUD for years before I had it removed.

I’m in my thirties now and I want children. I have always wanted children. That want lives in me like a quiet persistent fact underneath everything else — my career, my writing, the campaigns, my public life, even in my personal therapy. I want to be a mother. So I made a decision about my own body on my own timeline and I had the IUD taken out. Then I started Wegovy.

Wegovy is the GLP-1 medication I’ve been taking for a few months. It is not safe to take during pregnancy. The guidance is clear even if the research is limited: if you are on it, you should not get pregnant. Which means I am in the position of having removed my long-term birth control because I want to be a mother while being newly on a medication that means I cannot yet be one. My body, my desire, my medication, my timeline, my politics — all of it knotted together in a tangle that no piece of legislation has ever been careful enough to hold.

A further personal life update, I had unprotected sex this week, which matches the timeframe of when I am typically ovulating.

There was no post-sex glow. My panic started almost immediately, clean and cold, before I had even fully registered what had happened. The next morning I drove to CVS.

I was supposed to be going to the World Cup later that day. I had a ticket. I was planning on drinking a beer in the sun and watching France play and feeling, for a few hours, like the world was just a ball rolling across grass and none of the rest of it mattered. But first, I had to walk through this moment.

The store was relatively empty. It didn’t matter. The moment I walked through those doors I felt like there was a sign above my head, flashing, announcing to every stranger in that fluorescent light exactly why I was there. A pregnancy scare. Right here. This woman. Look.

I found the family planning aisle. I stood in front of the pregnancy tests and the ovulation tests for a long time. Longer than I needed to. I was taking it one step at a time and step one was figuring out if I was even ovulating because if I wasn’t then the math changed entirely. I picked up the ovulation tests. Then I looked for Plan B. It wasn’t on the shelf.

I know that Plan B has not been banned in Pennsylvania. It is technically still available at CVS. But it is sometimes kept behind the counter now. Sometimes you have to ask for it. And standing in that aisle, not seeing it where it used to be, I felt something tighten in my chest that I recognized immediately.

Fear. It was the fear of not knowing if the thing you might need is still there.

I was not ready to talk to someone. Not that morning. Not in that store with the fluorescent lights and the imaginary sign above my head. I could not make myself walk to the counter and say the words out loud to a stranger. I could not say that I might be in the middle of a pregnancy scare. I didn’t want to explain that a few months earlier before Wegovy, this would have been exciting news. So I didn’t. I took what I had and I went to self checkout, paid, and walked out.

I nearly got into someone else’s car in the parking lot. I was that deep inside my own head. I was already worrying if I needed to order Plan B online or go to a different CVS when I looked up and realized the car I was in front of wasn’t mine. I just stood there for a moment in the sun, just breathing.

When I took the ovulation test, it told me I was not ovulating. The scare was not a real scare. I did not have to go back to CVS. I did not have to figure out whether Plan B was behind the counter or whether I was ready to ask for it or whether, at my current weight on Wegovy, it would even work for me the way it was supposed to. I did not have to make any decision. My girl math worked out.

And then, underneath the relief that felt quiet and complicated and almost embarrassing, I could sense a twinge of something else. My disappointment.

I do not want to be pregnant right now. I am on a medication that means I shouldn’t be. I am in the middle of building something. The timing is all wrong.

But I was also, for just a moment, a little heartbroken that I wasn’t possibly pregnant.

Both of those things were true at the same time, in the same body, on the same Monday morning. The relief and the grief, sitting right next to each other, neither one canceling the other out.

This is the thing nobody tells you about living in a female body four years after Dobbs.

It isn’t just the women in ban states who are carrying something heavier than they were before. It isn’t just the women who have been denied care or forced to travel hundreds of miles or watched their doctors become afraid to treat them. Those stories are real and they are catastrophic and they deserve every word written about them today.

But there is another category of loss that doesn’t have a name yet. The loss that lives in women who technically still have access. Who live in states where abortion is still legal and Plan B is still available and nothing has technically been taken from them.

We are carrying it too. The fear in the CVS aisle when you can’t see what you’re looking for on the shelf. The calculation that now runs automatically — where am I, what state, what is available here, what would I do if I needed something and it wasn’t there. The way a Monday morning that should be about a World Cup game becomes instead a negotiation with your own biology and your own want and a political landscape that has made even the simplest act of reproductive self-determination feel like something you have to brace yourself for.

Dobbs didn’t have to take your rights to take something from you. It took the ease. The assumption that the thing you needed would be there when you needed it. The ability to stand in a CVS and feel like a person rather than a problem to be solved.

That afternoon, I stood in a stadium in Philadelphia in a severe weather delay, soaked through to my skin, dancing with French fans waiting for the second half of France versus Iraq to resume. I was drenched and laughing and completely present in a way that felt impossible six hours earlier in a CVS parking lot.

The body contains multitudes. Monday morning it was fear and grief and relief all at once. Monday evening it was rain and music and strangers and soccer and joy.

Both of those were me. Both of those were the same day.

That is what reproductive life actually looks like. Not a symbol. Not a before and after. Just a woman moving through a Monday, carrying everything at once, still showing up. No guardrails. No condoms. Unprotected in every sense of the word.