The City of New York Really Really Wants You to Get an IUD
Not to be all, Hey, ladies… But also, hey, ladies: Do you know anybody with an IUD? Oh, you do? Then you know all about how great the IUD is—it’s the most effective form of birth control! It doesn’t fuck with your estrogen levels! It’s impossible to forget to take it! you don’t have to depend on a guy to do anything! It might make you have no period at all! Basically, there is no form of birth control that causes its users to become quite so evangelical as the IUD, so keen are those who have one to convert any and every woman who needs birth control.
Well, turns out, the city of New York has climbed aboard the IUD bandwagon because a new campaign has started to roll out citywide which even comes with its own hashtag: #MaybeTheIUD. (Slightly wishy-washy, yes, but the city can’t exactly mandate birth control use via hashtag, now can it?)
NPR reports that this new ad campaign is the city’s latest attempt to promote safe sex, following similar progressive if unorthodox methods like the new “app that helps to locate a free condom on a big night out” (which, lol, “big night out”). These campaigns are important, because, as Deborah Kaplan, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health for the New York City Health Department, told NPR that, “Sex is part of life. Talking about birth control is part of life.”
True! And for many young people (who seem to be the intended target of the latest campaign, based on the, you know, neon colors and wacky font), the IUD is not necessarily part of the typical birth control conversation in the way that the Pill is or condoms are. And because women can never have enough options when it comes to finding a birth control method that’s right for them, it’s pretty awesome that NYC is making these options as easy to learn about as possible, offering a ton of information about the IUD on the Department of Health’s website.
Just promise us that if you do go out and get an IUD (which, go for it, they can be great), don’t be the kind of dick who then goes around telling every woman you know that it’s the only birth control option that makes any sense, because not everything works for every woman, we’re all different, that’s what makes us so beautiful or whatever. Even those of us who leave our birth control in Staten Island. Even them.