Eme: Celebrate, share stories of birth control, or risk losing it

As advocacy director for Tell Them, a grassroots network of 20,000 South Carolinians in support of responsible reproductive health policies, I’ve seen a growing need for women and men to speak up and share their stories of how birth control has positively impacted their lives. If we don’t share these stories, legislators will continue to chip away at services supporting basic women’s health care.

No matter how self-evident protecting access may seem to most of us, birth control is under attack. For the past 18 years, S.C. legislators have proposed bills seeking to grant full legal rights to fertilized eggs by defining “personhood” from the moment of fertilization, before pregnancy has occurred. This means that the most widely used forms of contraception like certain birth control pills and IUDs would be banned.

The fact is that 99 percent of women ages of 15-44 have used at least one form of birth control — that’s 540,440 South Carolina women — so we have stories to share.

The stories I hear from women and men about the importance of birth control center around the right to make decisions about whether, when and how to start a family. Often, however, the economic benefits of birth control get overlooked.

Economics professor Martha J. Bailey estimates that one third of women’s wage gains since the 1960s were made possible by birth control. Birth control gives women more control over childbearing, which provides opportunities to delay pregnancy until after college and after establishing a stable career and workplace experience that can lead to higher-earning careers.

Limiting women’s access to birth control would mean more unplanned pregnancies and costs associated with public health care and increased risk of participation in child welfare, and for children who have reached adolescence, increased risk of incarceration and lost tax revenue due to decreased earnings and spending. Teen childbearing in South Carolina cost taxpayers at least $166 million in 2010 alone.

Birth control empowers women and their partners to plan their pregnancies, gives women the chance to pursue their dreams and achieve economic success and saves our state money. That’s something to celebrate. To share your birth control story, use the hashtag #ThxBirthControl on Nov. 10 and tag @TellThemSC so we can celebrate with you.

This story was originally published November 5, 2015 at 11:47 AM with the headline "Eme: Celebrate, share stories of birth control, or risk losing it."