Oh, that’s the preventative pill, right?
You don’t have something for a mistake with contraception that happened
yesterday?” I asked at the counter of my small local Costa Rican pharmacy.
The junior pharmacist smiled sweetly at
me. He must have been little older than 22 years old.
“You mean la píldora del día después? Oh,
no that doesn’t exist here. Está prohibido,” he shared, looking
kindly at me with something akin to camaraderie.
I did a double-take. We had experienced a
fairly good pharmacist-client rapport until then. I tried again, certain that
somewhere my Spanish had let me down.
“So what does a woman do here, in the case that her usual contraception has
failed, as is the case for me?”
“Well,” he said, looking sweetly at me,
“if your usual method of contraception fails, and you fall pregnant, then hay
que tener un chiquitito.” He beamed, as if this was the greatest gift
anyone could hope for. Abortion is illegal in Costa Rica.
I stared at him, not quite believing what I had heard. This whippersnapper
was telling me, a 34 –year old woman new to his country, that if I fell
pregnant, now, single, and living and teaching here, 6 months into a 2-year
work contract; that if the unimaginable had happened and a split condom meant
that I was now pregnant by a man I had known for three weeks, I was going to
have to GIVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN BEING.
This kind-faced young man, still with
traces of post-pubescent acne on his jawline, had laid eyes on me all of 2
minutes ago, and yet, here he was, telling me in no uncertain terms what I was
to do with my body. The decision was made. Costa Rica said so. It was possibly
the most powerful “computer says no” moment I have ever experienced in my life.
And I’ve been to the DMV in New York City, where they have a lot of computer
says no moments.
Before you judge me as some kind of
promiscuous gringa; someone whose knicker elastic is as loose as
her morals, some harlot who goes out corrupting young Costa
Rican men with her worldly European charms and her tales of travel and the
Theory of Knowledge (the subject I teach), let me make something clear. I’ve
had three long relationships since the age of 16. My first lasted 6 years, and
we stayed together all through high school and university. I slept with precisely
no-one else aged 16-22. Then, upon that
relationship ending, I fell in love with an older guy, and we were together
for 2 years. He proposed. I accepted. We realised we had made a
mistake. I moved out to a shared house and slept with again, precisely no-one,
until a few months later, when I met the guy who I thought was the love of my
life. We were together 6 years, and we lived together for 5 of those, moving
our lives and work from London to Barcelona. When that relationship ended in
2015, I had a few partners, but you could count them on one hand. I think I
was fairly restrained, after a lifetime of sexual restraint. I like being
choosy. Not that it should matter, choosing to be choosy is just that: a
choice. An equally valid choice would have been to tear up society's rule book
and go to wild sex parties, but I'm basically too much of a germaphobe.
In my life therefore I have taken the morning after pill exactly twice. Once
after a very young and very stupid experience with my very first partner, a
manipulative older guy, aged 15 ¾, and once again last year, after a night with
a close friend, a guy my age (we should have both known better – but – mojitos
– and we trusted one another a lot. A pregnancy wouldn’t have been the end of
the world, but he was moving to Colombia and I to Costa Rica.)
What I had taken for granted in my EU
liberal bubble, I suppose, is how easily available that option had been to me. Even so, in my very first experience at a sexual health clinic, I was terrified. I was
technically under the age of consent, by a month or two, and a nurse had to
give me an extra assessment to ascertain if I was mentally able to make the
decision to receive the morning-after pill without them informing my parent.
They also had to check that I wasn’t asking for it as a result of abuse, or
something untoward. I had to go with my high-school best friend, whose older
sister knew where the clinic was, and assured us it would be confidential. I
trembled throughout the assessment, feeling like I’d been sent to the school
principal’s office. All of the nurse’s questions seemed designed to make me
feel slutty and wrong.
My second experience was much more
straightforward. I walked into a Barcelona pharmacy, asked for the pill, paid,
and gulped it down. I sent a text to my friend to let him know. He treated me
to an ice-cream and a hug, and we resolved to be more responsible.
In a different country, with a different prevailing set of beliefs, with a
different partner, I too feel different. It was clear that my values and
judgements about what was correct were not totally aligned with the law in
Costa Rica. I'd noticed snippets of machismo in daily life here - catcalls,
being called muchacha, or girl, by older men, enduring plenty of
ogling - but I hadn't imagined that my right to a safe, legal way to control my
fertility would have been questioned. After some heavy googling and plenty of
frantic whatsapps on the subject, it became evident that Costa Rican women do
of course have another method. The Yuzpe regimen, as
explained by the World Health Organization,
is an equally effective post-coital method of emergency contraception alongside
the copper IUD and the morning-after pill. It's sightly more fiddly, requiring
two megadoses of the combined ordinary pill taken 12 hours apart, but it
exists. And boy, was I glad it did. But I had to question what I would have
done had I found myself in the same situation aged 15 ¾. Or were I not an educated woman with access
to information from trusted sources and not just the final word from a spotty pharmacist. I asked myself what the outcome might have
been for a young Costa Rican girl living in a rural part of the country, or in a very
strict Catholic household. I asked myself what many women must have to do in
other parts of the world. And even as a committed feminist, a liberal, a
teacher - I myself was shocked by how little time I had spent reflecting on
what the reality of access to contraception and choice must be for many women
worldwide.
For this, and so
many other reasons, I marched on International Women's Day, March 8, here in San José, amongst thousands of
other women and men, protesting femicide, domestic abuse,
inequality, lack of access to legal and safe abortions, and the right for women
living here to make their own decisions about their bodies' destinies, as well
as their ability to work, live, love and exist without fear of judgement, harassment or
comment. As I walked alongside people of all ages, holding placards with
slogans like "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries", or "Ni una menos!" (a call to action on the number of femicides, several this year
already shaking the bedrock of Costa Rican life to its core), I thought about a
time when this won't be necessary. I hope I might live to see it. I also tried
to think of my sweet junior pharmacist ever having someone tell him in no
uncertain terms that he would have to be a father. (Maybe he already is.)
That's the thing about this blinkered approach to birth control. It's offensive
to men and women alike, robbing both sides of their sovereignty. It no
doubt makes both genders feel trapped, and less trusting of the other. I
wondered what the correlation is between countries with legal abortions and
widespread access to birth control and equality of opportunity in terms of
education, pay and opportunity. This paper from
Georgetown University's Law Center helped answer my query.
Don't get me wrong,
Costa Rica is a stunning place, with so much to recommend. Its people and way
of life are often embodied by the phrase "¡Pura Vida!", which
generally means, "no worries, no fuss, no stress, life is good", but
I now see: there's still a little way to go.
