Okay, so you don’t care. You tell me you don’t have sex too much and that is kind of like birth control. It isn’t. It might be if it took having sex five times to have a kid, but it only takes one, so you are very likely to get pregnant. Once you get pregnant, the child is your responsibility for life. This should be taken seriously — it isn’t always a bundle of joy and not all “moms” are equipped to handle the stress. If you try to murder the kid you are in worse trouble — yes I have seen girls who have tried that one. Sometimes the baby-daddy will marry you. This does not necessarily mean happiness — you probably never were thinking of him as a baby-daddy anyway, just a guy who wanted sex and you didn’t feel like fighting with him. Maybe it felt good at the time, but that was then and this is now. If you decide to bring up the child on your own, this single-mother bit is no picnic. Sure, you got a cute little baby who loves your breast or bottle or whatever. You might not want to think about it now, but in fifteen years or so, you are at high risk to end up with a juvenile delinquent who puts bricks through windows(or worse) and you are responsible.
You MUST take charge of your life. I mean, when someone who sees me tells me she practices birth control, I applaud her – Literally, I clap my hands. It means you value yourself enough to take charge of your life. It means you know at least a little bit about who you are and what you want to do. Most things you would like to do are a lot harder if you need to pay for babysitting, child care, or someone to pick up your human responsibility from school when you would rather be enjoying personal time. I mean, this is the 21st century, and you can do all kinds of stuff to make sure you do not turn into a parent. Don’t bother telling me you don’t want “the pill” because you will never remember to take it every day. I can tell you all about injections, implants, painless stuff to install in your lady-plumbing. There are lots of ways to do birth control.
There are some wise people who know all about this at Planned Parenthood. They have offices everyplace, and those angels do it free, so you can’t avoid it by complaining that you can’t afford it. Maybe you believe in a religion where birth control is against your religion. My answer is that if your religion doesn’t allow birth control, it probably also doesn’t allow sleeping with people you are not married to. So what you got, honey, sounds like an excuse for being too lazy to say “no” to guys or to get birth control. That does not sound much like a religion to me.
There is even a thing called a “morning after pill,” if you think there is any chance you could have gotten pregnant the night before, you go to the pharmacist, even if you are underage, and see what can be done. Incidentally, you don’t want to have a baby while you are on psychiatric medicines. If the little bitty guy spontaneously aborts you are really lucky, because you can get all kinds of bad malformations, even with really common medicines. You have absolutely nothing to lose by checking out birth control. Go get birth control. Please.
Estelle Toby Goldstein, M.D. is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is licensed to practice in the state of California. She holds a valid license from the DEA to write prescriptions, but is an expert in nutritional therapies involving vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other cutting-edge treatments.
A native of Boston, she graduated from medical school in France, and after returning the US, did her internship in general surgery and residencies in neurosurgery and psychiatry. She has also done fellowships in neurology in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and psychopharmacology at the University of Kansas, Wichita.
She calls her current practice “Natural Alternative Mind-Body Medicine” and chiefly concentrates on transitioning patients away from prescription drugs and onto natural substances. She is also a master practitioner of Emotional Freedom Technique, a powerful and dynamic form of energy psychology that usually brings quicker results than traditional psychotherapy.
A proud veteran, she has served as psychiatrist to the 82nd Airborne in Ft. Bragg, NC while in the U.S. Army and worked in the VA Hospital system in several states.
After her Army service, she held faculty posts in both University of Kansas and University of Oklahoma schools of medicine.
Dr. Goldstein is in demand as a public speaker and a media guest, and has written an advice column in a major market daily newspaper and hosted a weekly call-in radio show on one of the national networks. She now lives in the Napa Valley of Northern California with her husband and business partner, Wade B. Ward.