PRINTCatholic girl confessions
The battle between religion and premarital sex
VOX STAFF
April 26, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
My mother and I sat on the gynecologist’s pink vinyl chairs in silence. She pretended to read her book. I tapped my foot and stared at the shelf of pamphlets across the room from me.
Annoyed by my fidgeting, my mother whispered: “Oh stop it. Everyone has to go through this at some point.” She was right. For three generations, every woman in my family had sat in those uncomfortable chairs — they hadn’t been replaced since the 1950s — and waited for her first gynecological exam. I had never met Dr. Anstey before, but he had been a part of my family longer than my own father.
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The nurse called my name. I was terrified of what might happen beyond the waiting room, and in my anxiousness, I sprang from my seat and rushed toward her without my mother.
“Now Rachel, because this is your first time here, I’m not going to examine you,” Dr. Anstey said.
The relief couldn’t spread across my face fast enough, but it was short-lived.
“But I understand you have something you want to ask me,” he added. When I scheduled the appointment, the receptionist had asked me what my visit was regarding. I didn’t really need an exam. I was meeting with Dr. Anstey for a different reason. I was 18, in love for the first time and soon to become sexually active. But my boyfriend, Christian, and I were Catholic.
As far as the Pope, my parish priest, the nuns at my high school and my father were concerned, sex before marriage was out of the question. Also, the Catholic Church has traditionally criticized the use of any kind of birth control. Birth control was unnatural and unacceptable. If you don’t want to have babies, just don’t have sex, they said. Simple.
But it wasn’t.
I decided I wanted to have sex with Christian, and I wanted to talk with my mom about going on birth control. I broached the subject with her in the car on the way to my grandmother’s house. I had been putting the conversation off for three months. Maybe it’s best to do it quickly, I thought to myself.
“Mom, I love Christian, and he loves me, and we’re going to have sex, and I want to go on the pill,” I blurted out, probably a little louder and faster than I should have.
“What?” she yelled. She stared straight ahead at the road, panicking. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You told me to! When you tried to have the sex talk with me, you said I should talk to you before I sleep with anyone!” Our volume wasn’t out of anger but nervousness.
“Well, I didn’t mean it!” she said. “You have so much going for you.” She whispered now. “You have such a bright future, and I’d hate to see you throw it all away.”
By “throwing it away,” my mom meant getting pregnant, quitting school to raise a child, getting married before I was ready or any of the other challenges that arise when a baby enters the picture.
Or maybe she just didn’t want to see me get duped by a guy.
“Fine,” she conceded. “I’ll take you. But don’t tell your father.”
When I explained all this to Dr. Anstey, he nodded in understanding but added in a grandpa-like tone: “Be careful. Guys are scum.”
He gave me enough sample pills to last me five months. “If these work out, we’ll give you a prescription,” he said. The pills came in a plain black bag, so no one would know what I was carrying. I put the bag under my coat, just in case others could see through it to the bright yellow packets screaming Ortho Tri-Cyclen like a neon sign that read “Hey, everyone, this girl is going to have premarital S-E-X.”
Three years later, Christian is gone — to no one’s surprise, especially Dr. Anstey’s. But he left a few things in his wake.
I still have my pills. Although, this is mostly because I think it’s pretty cool that I can predict on exactly which day I’ll have my period.
More than that, though, I own the guilt of knowing that I’ve lied to my dad and my church. But maybe that’s the cross I bear as a Catholic.
When it comes to birth control, the choice for so many Catholic women is between obeying a father and choosing your own path. Or following a dogma and protecting your own body. We lie to our fathers — real and ethereal — to secure ourselves, but not without a little guilt. And whether the Pope knows what that feels like is anyone’s guess.
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