hi! i’ve been having penatrative sex with someone, and i have an iud. if he cums inskde of me, do i need to take plan b? it happened twice in a span of a couple of days. do you think i should double down and take emergency contraception? thank you!!
Hello!
Generally, it's not a necessity! That's one of the primary reasons people get IUDs; because they prevent pregnancy.
They're usually around 99% effective, though of course you can take Plan B if you have access to it, I'm just saying that you don't have to.
Nearly 32,000 Manitobans have accessed birth control in the first four months since the province introduced its free prescription contracept
Nearly 32,000 Manitobans accessed birth control in the first four months after the rollout of a free prescription contraceptives program, the province says.
Under the program, launched last October, eligible residents can access 60 commonly used birth control methods, including contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices (IUDs), hormonal implants and contraceptive injections.
Oral contraceptives — often referred to as "the pill" — were the most commonly dispensed product between Oct. 1 and Jan. 31, a government spokesperson told CBC Manitoba in an emailed statement, with 31,931 individuals getting a prescription dispensed under the plan over that period.
I was all set to publish a normal daily report today when I came across two bits of news: Idaho Republicans are back in federal court fighting for the right to deny women life-saving abortions, and South Carolina lawmakers have reintroduced legislation to make abortion punishable by the death penalty. Considering this comes at the same time that politicians are disbanding or tampering with maternal mortality committees in order to cover up the fact that their bans kill women, it seemed like the right moment to take a step back and acknowledge how absolutely fucking crazy this is.
They’re killing us, and we’re meant to behave as if it’s business as usual.
Anti-abortion politicians and activists have demonstrated again and again that they believe women’s lives are expendable—worthless, really, if not for our reproductive ability. Yet we’re expected to sit here and react to that violence as if it’s simply politics. As if it’s perfectly fine that our suffering and deaths are being debated in statehouses and courtrooms as if we’re not human beings, but thought exercises and legal arguments.
That’s the hardest thing about doing this work. As difficult as it is to comb through the onslaught of awful abortion rights news every day, the real horror is the normalization.
Because truly, how is it possible that there isn’t one single headline or news article about the South Carolina bill that could punish abortion patients with the death penalty? Is that how little our lives rate?
It’s not as if reporters didn’t know the legislation was coming; Republicans have introduced this bill before. In fact, last year two dozen lawmakers co-sponsored the ‘Equal Protection Act’—a bill that doesn’t only classify abortion as a homicide, but defines personhood as beginning at fertilization.
That means conservatives who believe emergency contraception and IUDs stop the implantation of a fertilized egg could argue that these common forms of birth control are actually abortions. In other words, birth control could be punishable by the death penalty. Still, not a peep from mainstream media outlets. As if such legislation should just be expected.
Similarly, the legal fight over emergency abortions only warranted three headlines today, from CNN, the Associated Press and Newsweek. We’re talking about a case that could determine whether states can legally deny women life-saving abortions in hospital emergency rooms. That’s a front-page story—an issue that deserves coverage in every publication across the country. Instead, we got a few obligatory paragraphs in a handful of outlets.
For those who need a reminder, this case revolves around the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)—a federal law that requires hospitals to provide life-saving emergency care, including abortions. In 2022, the Biden administration sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s abortion ban prevents doctors from following EMTALA.
By the time the suit reached the Supreme Court, we heard about doctors having to airlift women out of Idaho for emergency care, and a medical system so broken that OBGYNs were advising pregnant patients to get extra life insurance. Still, Idaho Republicans defended the law and pooh-poohed concerns about patients’ lives. At one point American women were put in the surreal position of watching the nation’s highest court debate just how many organs are acceptable for them to lose before the state should be required to provide an abortion.
In the end, the Supreme Court didn’t issue a ruling on the merits but kicked the case back to a lower court. That’s where it is now, with the Ninth Circuit—where we’ll have to listen to lawyers debate our lives like bullet points all over again.
[...]
We need to say it constantly and consistently, online and off: This is as bad as it seems. They are as unhinged and cruel as they seem. And no amount of calling themselves ‘pro-life’—or trying to normalize this horror—will ever hide the truth. They’re killing us, and we won’t let America forget it.
Jessica Valenti wrote this solid piece in her Abortion, Every Day blog about how abortion bans kill women and how unhinged the anti-abortion movement is.
I keep hearing about how birth control pills affect fertility-is there any truth to that? Not just your body adjusting to being off the pill but like months or years after? Also, have you had the experience of PCPs or OBs favoring certain BC methods over others? In my area, it seems like pills are more prescribed versus IUDs, for example.
Nonsense! Preposterous! Balderdash!
Birth control pills only affect fertility while you take them. They are designed to prevent ovulation (release of an egg to be fertilized), but when they are stopped ovulation resumes normally within a few months.
Pills are likely prescribed more often than IUDs for several reasons. 1) pills are used for more indications than just birth control (like acne, PMS, heavy bleeding, irregular bleeding, etc), 2) pills are cheap 3) pills are non-invasive, and 4) pills are easily discontinued. Not everyone wants long term contraception on board, and many people don’t want to have to undergo a somewhat uncomfortable procedure to get an IUD or implant placed. Add to that the fact that some people are just weirded out by IUDs. Patient preference is one of the biggest factors in choosing a contraceptive.
As for choosing a type of contraceptive to prescribe, any doctor who prescribes birth control pills over some other form based on a lazy personal preference is committing malpractice at some point. There are many different types of birth control because there are many types of patients who may need it. To prescribe pills willy-nilly with no consideration of a patient’s history of things like smoking, breast cancer, blood clots, migraine auras, and other things, is terrible doctoring. Contraceptive pills that have estrogen and progesterone in them (Combined OCPs, or cOCPs) increase a person’s risk of blood clots, so if they have other risk factors for clotting it’s an absolute no-no to prescribe them. You may see OBs show a preference for progesterone-only pills (POPs) in the immediate post partum period, and this preference is because delivery increases the clotting risk even more than baseline and combined OCPs may dry up milk supply.
We all have our pet pills though that we go to when they’re the right choice for the patient. There are tons of different brands of cOCPs, and they all contain ethinyl estradiol and some form of progesterone (there are about 5 out there), though there are some varying dose options as well. They’re all essentially the same so we generally pick one we know our local pharmacies have and write that one as our standard starting OCP unless we need to play around with the dose a little.
I didn’t get the second part of your message, so I hope this answered everything nonny!
Hi there! I had really bad sex ed growing up so this may be a stupid question but anyways: if you put a tampon in after someone cums in you does that make you more likely to get pregnant? Also, I have an IUD so that makes it safe for me to have unprotected sex right? (Safe from pregnancy, I know not from STDs) Thank you!!!
Hello! I have a No Questions Are Stupid Questions rule, so don't worry about it. Thank you for trusting me to answer.
There's not really much research to suggest a tampon does much of anything in that scenario. I believe some people tried to use it as a birth control method (like it would absorb the sperm?) but it definitely doesn't work for that and I don't think there's anything research to suggest it makes pregnancy more likely either.
As for the IUD, yes. It's generally like a 99.9% protection, which is obviously really good. It's not a 100% but nothing is.
Birth control remains legal everywhere, but in some states its become harder to access due to abortion misconceptions.
Elizabeth Weise at USA Today:
There's a battle being waged across the country between people who see birth control as essential for women's health, self-determination and to avoid abortions ‒ and those who claim some forms of contraception cause abortions and should not be funded by taxpayers.
Birth control remains legal in all 50 states and can be purchased over the counter with no age limit. But lawmakers in at least seven states have attempted to cut off funding or scuttle bills that ensure access to some popular forms of birth control.
Major medical groups and 10 health researchers interviewed by USA TODAY say there is no evidence that any of the popular forms of birth control end human lives. And some groups that oppose abortion still support the wide availability of birth control to help prevent unwanted pregnancies.
[...]
The conservative concern about contraceptives
The anti-contraceptive push is being led by groups that say birth control methods such as IUDs and “the morning-after pill,” which includes popular brands such as Plan B and ella, cause abortions and should not be funded by taxpayer money.
A group called Students for Life goes further, calling birth control pills, IUDs, birth control implants and emergency contraception all abortifacients, saying only condoms, diaphragms, vaginal sponges, spermicide and “natural family planning” (i.e., the rhythm method) are acceptable forms of birth control.
[...]
But even for those who believe fertilization, not implantation, is the beginning of life, doctors say opposition to contraception is based on a misunderstanding of how it works.
Birth control methods do not threaten human life, they say, because in almost every case egg and sperm never meet, so fertilization cannot happen.
“Contraception by definition is prevention of pregnancy, not the interruption of pregnancy,” Emma Chew Murphy, a doctor at the University of California, San Francisco Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences. “Birth control does not cause abortion.”
Misinformation is keeping women from using birth control
The public debate over birth control has consequences, data shows. Especially in the 13 states that have total abortion bans, many women think they no longer can access some forms of birth control.
“A survey in 2023 found that almost half of women in full-ban states believe Plan B is illegal in their states,” said Dima Qato, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Southern California who studies access to emergency contraception.
There’s also significant misinformation about emergency contraception circulating online, falsely claiming it is dangerous to women or that it causes abortions, Qato said.
For young women, who are more likely to use the morning-after pill, the misinformation can keep them from accessing it.
[...]
IUDs can also work as emergency contraception
IUDs can also be used as a type of emergency contraception if they are inserted within five days of unprotected sex. However, a pregnancy test is done beforehand to ensure a pregnancy has not already been established.
Using IUDs this way is still relatively rare but highly effective, with a failure rate of only 1 in 1,000, said Dr. Mitchell Creinin, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, Davis.
The IUD could also affect contractions in the fallopian tubes that move the egg down toward the uterus and the cilia that waft the sperm up toward the egg, said Dr. David Turok, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah who studies the use of IUDs as emergency contraception.
Using IUDs as emergency contraception is still very rare. In a tiny number of instances, it is possible that a fertilized egg could be created, said Turok.
[...]
How emergency contraception (the morning-after pill) works
Sometimes called “the morning-after pill,” emergency contraception is sold as Plan B or ella, among other brands. It is a single pill containing hormones that delay or prevent the release of an egg from the ovaries. It is not the same thing as the abortion pill.
If a woman is already pregnant, emergency contraception will not stop or harm the pregnancy, according to the U.S. Office of Women’s Health.
Americans United for Life, a group opposed to abortion, believes that in some cases the morning-after pill might destroy an egg that has been fertilized. Carolyn McDonnell, litigation counsel at the group, noted that the FDA information for Plan B states that "it may inhibit implantation."
Because of that, the group opposes the method. "We defend the conscience rights of health care professionals who are concerned about the potential abortion-inducing effects of emergency contraceptives in a minority of cases," McDonnell said.
This USA Today article calling out anti-birth control misinformation is a gem.
