Contraception

[Jayc]

Its been a long time since anyone posted anything here - I wonder if anyone is still looking in....Anyway, I'll give it a go. I've just started taking the pill (progesterone only) and I'm feeling very low. I'm not sure if its the pill, or exhaustion or, or, or, but I wondered if anyone else had found that the pill brought them down. Any experiences?

14 - although it was so disappointing I didn't bother again until I was 17. Definitely too young.

susanmt

snap! Except I was 20.

On the losing virginity front I was 14, in a stable relationship (in as much as they can be at that age) and my Dad, wisely IMO, took me to get the pill prescribed as soon as he knew. I am so grateful to him for that since I thought at the time that I'd rather kill myself than tell my mum I was pregnant (I am not joking, sadly).

I think if teenagers are having sex they should have access to contraception: once they've started they're unlikely to stop just because you tell them to. And once my son does I will allow girlfriends to stay at my house since I'll feel happier knowing they're here rather than at it in some darkened park full of perverts. I know it'll be a minefield in terms of girls' parents though. Mmmm.

Re the abortion pill, I looked into this a while back and found lots of negative information about it on the internet. I seem to remember that it was originally intended for use on cancer patients and carried the side effect of miscarriage which is how it was discovered, but I could be wrong. I wouldn't blame anyone for using it but I don't think I could go through the experience it involves. I'm pro-choice for sure though.

I'm also terrified by the story of someones' ds sharing with a coil! How likely is this, does anyone know? I have a coil and would HATE to accidentally get pregnant since I'm smoking and drinking and would want to stop before conceiving. Reassurance please!

Shame that no-one seems to mention telling teenagers about love and respect not only for each other but for themselves too. Just taking them along to the GPs for contraception isn't really good enough, that's giving them the green light for sleeping with whoever they want to. At their age they are under a lot of peer pressure, all my classmates were having sex, I think I was the only one who wasn't! So God knows what it's like these days! This wasn't done out of love however, but out of 'well, so and so has done it so I have to' or 'he says he'll dump me if I don't and tell all his mates that I'm frigid'. Do we really want this to be our kids first sexual encounter?

Message withdrawn

Good to know I'm not such a freak after all! In case anyone was wondering we didn't (quite) manage to wait until we were married, and I was also his first.
I have actually told schoolchildren this when I once had to do sex education when I was filling in for someone else. And the reaction was actually 'thst would be nice' and 'thats what I want' - but it was really sad that some 6th years had slept with more people than me!!

I thought you might like a teenagers POV on this and so I've asked my 15yr old. She says that in her experience hardly anyone in her year at school and very few in the year above have lost their virginity. So they're not all sleeping around! She hasn't seen any of the attitude 'She's doing it so I may as well.'

She's kind of disappointed that she and her peers are being labelled as 'sex-maniacs', in her words. And, WickedWW, she says the thought of having sex with a boyfriend in your parents house - yuk, yuk, yuk!!!

As I remember it, it's not so much having sex in your parents house, it's them knowing that you are (and when you're at it!) that was the real turn off.

I have a friend with a 19yo son whose girlfriend often stays over. My friend says that he finds it really difficult when he and his wife are trying to watch TV and they can hear the bed banging upstairs - but they don't dare say anything because they know that their son would die of embarrassment.

As to sex education, at my school we were taught the mechanics at 11, but didn't get the relationships talk until we were in the upper 6th (a little late for some of us). Looking back that seems totally backwards to me - how can you responsibly teach sex education without talking about caring and responsibility at the same time?

www, I've actually known of 2 people become pregnant whilst using the coil, the first was a girl who started a college course when I did about 10 years ago, she found out that she was pregnant and had several threatened miscarriages, I don't know if the coil was removed or if she did eventually miscarry because she never returned to college. The second was a friend of mine who was allergic to latex and couldn't use condoms, DD1 was conceived whilst she was on the pill and DD2 was conceived whilst she was using the coil. The coil was removed once it was known that she was pregnant and she went on to have a successful pregnancy with no complications. I don't know how common it is for pregnancy whilst using a coil and I don't know what sort of coil either of these ladies were using. Not a very useful source of information really am I?

Hey Rhubarb, I also got lots of advice about love and respect and relationships from my dad: he didn't just take me off to the doctor, far from it. And I will do the same with my ds (talking). And I agree with you that they should all be taught about love, relationships and respect too, but I don't think giving contraception to sexually active teenagers is tantamount to saying they can screw around. SueDonim, I know what you mean: they will probably decline my kind offer, preferring to do it in a darkened park or somewhere

PamT, Oh dear! My fingers are crossed

Most of the kids at my school were not virgins, and they weren't just boasting either! But then, my school was very working-class, very rough and teenage pregnancies were more or less the norm. Some kids were very responsible about this and stayed with their partners throughout, others have different babies to different partners before they reached 18! The only reason I didn't do it was;
a) I was terrified of my mother, a very hard and frightening woman back then.
b) I knew absolutely nothing about sex whatsoever.
c) No-one offered!!!!

Contraception is of course much more preferable to abortion, but I would want to make sure that my child had thought through the consequences. That she wasn't getting pressurised, that it wasn't just curiosity and that I had met this boy and gone through his past history with a fine toothcomb!! IMO the abortion pill is such a bad idea - I can almost see the poor teenage girl having a miscarriage on the bathroom floor in tears, with no-one around her. And what if it makes them more susceptible to miscarriages in the future? After all their bodies are still developing.

And I was an old virgin, but it wasn't through lack of trying!!!!

Just reporting back re having mirena coil fitted yesterday afternoon.
Up in the chair, legs apart.... oh, how can anyone keep a straight face??!! I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt, but the local anaesthetic I think was the worst bit.
Suggest anyone having a coil fitted needs to take st's and a handbag full of neurofen with them. My pains were pretty bad on the way home, and had to stop at garage, praying they'd stock painkillers!
Today, I'm fine. No pains, nothing!

Mind you, scary stuff about getting pregnant when you've got a coil. Still, there's no way out for me now!

Glad it went OK fms. Its not the most dignified, is it? But then, after you've given birth, who cares? All my dignity is long gone. Actually today I bumped into the midwife who delivered ds in the supermarket (we live in a small community) and it was only afterwards I thought how weird it was, here was me talking to this woman quite at ease and she had done an internal on me! Yeuch!

LOL Reading over last post it looks like I had ds on the floor in Safeways, which isn't quite right!!

Rhubarb, I agree, the scenario you paint of the teenage girl miscarrying alone on the bathroom floor is an unpleasant one. But it's not just teenage girls who need terminations.

This pill means that a woman can have a medically-induced miscarriage say, 3 weeks after conception, which will be no more painful or risky than a period, whereas otherwise she will have to wait an unspecified length of time for a surgical procedure (carrying all the risks associated with GA and others including perforated uterus).

Surely the first option is far preferable in terms of psychological health and physical safety? The thought of a teenage girl going through a very early miscarriage doesn't worry me in the slightest compared to the very real occurrences of teenage girls giving birth alone in secret because they couldn't face the options open to them.