My Story: Learning About Birth Control From My Catholic School

By Saniya Ghanoui — November 19, 2022

BK shares what she learned from her Catholic school about birth control. BK mentions how people assume birth control is only for sex without learning about all the health benefits it provides women.

Transcript:

OBOS Today: Did your school often like preach to you guys that it wasn’t good to like, take the pill and stuff like that? 

BK: Yes, so, um, I, we learned a lot about controversial topics junior year so that was after I was already on the pill, but they did tell us like that you have to do natural family planning which is you take your period and you put it on the calendar and then you just do the math of when you ovulate so you know not to have sex during that time. But you can’t have sex until marriage. So it wasn’t, they already were telling us, “It’s wrong, you can’t do that because that’s not what God intended was for you to be taking this pill that would be controlling your body and when you have um when you have sex and, and controlling, um, when you can get pregnant. That’s you playing God and you shouldn’t be doing that. If you do that it’s a sin.”

OBOS Today: And was that harder for you to co—like kind of come to terms with more than like telling your mom or was that just something that like you were like okay whatever?

BK: Um it definitely played a little bit into um telling my mom but I know my family is not religious at all so I knew that there wouldn’t really be a religious factor, but I felt like there is this societal thing around it that being on the pill means that you’re going um to have sex and that’s the only reason that you would be on the pill. 

OBOS Today: Mhm, and was your mom like, um, her being so okay and open with it was that like a huge relief for you?

BK: Yes, cause I thought for sure that she was going to assume that it meant that I at the time wanted to have sex. I wasn’t even dating anyone at the time. But I thought that that’s what she would assume because that’s what a lot of people in my school assumed about me. 