Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Unzipping Birth Control: Contraception, Abortion, and the Language That Divides Us

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

In this episode of Unzipping Taboos, we unzip the tangled narratives around birth control, emergency contraception, and abortion. Too often, political headlines and misinformation blur these terms together — leaving people confused, misinformed, or even shamed for making decisions about their own bodies.We break down the difference between preventing pregnancy and ending one, highlighting how methods like the pill, IUDs, and emergency contraception actually work — and how political rhetoric blurs those lines to push an agenda. We talk about why it matters that we get the science and terminology right, and we question why those who claim to be “pro-life” often fight against the very tools that prevent unplanned pregnancies like comprehensive sex ed and accessible contraception. Together, we call out the dangerous conflation of birth control and abortion, and emphasize the importance of accurate sex ed, and the importance of accountability from policymakers.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestionsIf you want to ask Dr Sue a sex question for the weekly Q&A you can submit it here: Ask a question

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about, but don't always feel comfortable asking out loud. No judgment, no shame, just open, honest conversations. So zip down and let's get candid. Before we get started, we've got some exciting news. we are now partnered with jackandjilladult.com, one of the top online adult stores. And because you're here with us, you get 20% off with the code UNZIPPING20. Now that the business is out of the way, I am here with Dr. Sue. Hey, Dr. Sue. Hey, Charlie. How's it going? I'm pissed off for this one. Yeah. I know. I know. Before we dive in, before we do the big reveal,

yeah you want to give our listeners a little bit about your background before we get started yeah and this time i'm gonna yeah so i'm dr sue i have a phd in human sexuality and before that i have two degrees in health education and have worked as a health educator and sex educator for several decades now um while primarily now i work as an academic and i've co-written a textbook on human sexuality and i speak at national and international conferences i started my career as reproductive working reproductive health clinics so working as an educator in reproductive health clinics and our local communities because we're going to talk about access to contraception and misinformation and that's going to piss me off but in addition so yeah so i've worked in

reproductive health clinics and now i'm working primarily in academia but i also like to share all my information not just with charlie and you folks here on the podcast but i also answer questions that folks submit anonymously and we'll put the link to that in the bio um you can send them a question to me and then every sunday at 9 p.m eastern i answer that question all over the place all over social media um so if you have a question that you want me to answer no judgment it's submitted anonymously so um feel free to submit it if you've got a show idea and i know we say this at the end but today may spark some today may spark some things uh we'll also have a link to submit a show just idea to us if you're not sure they all go to

the same email address so one place and and and we'll figure out where if it's best I should play do more about my qualifications but I feel like the degrees and the experience are enough I let you I'll let you do it yeah yeah yeah so now I have to introduce Charlie so for those of you who don't have I do I do, though. For those of you who do and do not know Charlie, Charlie is our curious co-host who is always ready to unzip those taboos about all those things around sex and sexuality and relationships that we very rarely openly talk about. But tell us more. uh that's me uh dr sue and i have been friends and done yeah and dismount um dr sue and i have been friends for many years and we find that we are just uh from day one from day dot um we we found that we were very comfortable having these types of conversations without really knowing

where the other one stood and and even more so when when we do have the conversations and we have slight variances or disagree. And it's really always an interesting conversation. And I always walk away learning something and having a broader perspective. In addition to that, I am someone who really enjoys questioning and challenging societal norms. That feels like an outdated phrase these days societal norms because because things are changing so rapidly um but i'm just here to analyze and question and and figure out um and and just have these conversations have these conversations around subjects that we're not supposed to talk about especially as women in society um and giving space for for listening and and learning

to factual things usually we've introduced yeah we've usually introduced the topic by now but we weren't really sure how to do it so uh you got a submission to hey dr sue actually i had a phone call ah that's right so hey dr sue um if you've been submitting questions by the way i'm on like a two-month backlog i'm getting to the questions i just people have found me and now i'm the font of information that i was kind of hoping to be so i am on about a two-month backlog so if you have submitted be patient i will get there but sometimes things get bumped and the reason that topics will get bumped is that something happens either at a live event in one of my classrooms

or in this case a very angry phone call a very angry phone call um so uh i don't want to date this because i know that we're not going to go we never know when we're actually posting stuff um in september of 2025 um the u.s government destroyed about 10 million dollars if i'm remembering the number right in contraceptives that were supposed to be shipped worldwide and the reason given by an employee of the office that did it said that it was because they could that things like birth control pills hormonal implants and iuds could be used for abortion which is just not accurate it's just not accurate um and so my friend called she was very very very angry and with her permission um i did turn that into a hey dr sue post but i thought it was

really important that we're also having this conversation with the larger audience because my posts are less than five minutes like less than a five minute read usually around 500 600 words but I think this topic deserved more time and more space and the follow-up to her question only because I always like to talk about the sad state of sex ed in this country her her question was why don't people know this shit by now I'm like well that's that's an easy one because we don't yeah we don't talk about like that one I can answer in five seconds we don't talk about it done um so yeah so that's that's kind of the topic we wanted to dive in and pull apart i mean we could break this down in less than one minute and be like hey those aren't abortions thank you

next but there's there needs to be some more conversation so that's our topic so thank you for my pissed off friend who i think is still pissed off um but i appreciate letting us use that. Yeah. Thank you very much. So let's get into this. What is it that discerns birth control from abortion? Yeah. So here's the thing. In my class, in Dr. Milstein's class, so my students actually joke about this by about four weeks in that we have a dictionary just for our class, that there are words that in my space you must use this way. The second you walk out the door, I don't really care what you're doing. But like, we actually spend a lot of time defining the word sex. And I know we've talked about that in a previous episode. So there are words that I

insist that they use correctly in my space, understanding that in the real world, we don't do that. And one of them is that I make them differentiate between birth control and abortion. Because in my world, there is a difference between those two things. So in my world, birth control is anything that prevents birth. And so this is where things are going to get confusing because technically that would include abortion. But contraception is anything that prevents egg and sperm from meeting and doing the dance of love. So if we're not even having sperm and egg get together, it's not abortion because we never had fertilization. So for me, I make them use the term oral contraception to literally separate out those concepts. Something like

birth control pills. I hate saying that. Oral contraceptives. So unlike oral contraceptives, the hormonal implant, often called Nexplanon, and IUDs, there are two types. There are hormonal and non-hormonal. Those are all designed to stop you from getting pregnant in the first place. Abortion terminates a pre-existing relationship. Oh yeah, I could do that too. yeah abortion take two um terminates a pre-existing pregnancy which there won't be if you're using iud's birth control pills and the implant correctly there it is that's the whole that's it we did it the whole topic so let's let's get into this notion of the hormonal contraception yeah so it's fascinating

so hormones there's all sorts of things when i was your age we had the pill now um there's so many options right now for hormones there is the pill there's the patch which a lot of folks aren't really using there's a ring same thing most people aren't using a vaginal ring not like one ring that rules them all yeah yeah no like a vaginal ring um the pill sorry the patch and the ring and the shot aren't really that popular here in the u.s so the hormonal methods like the pill, the hormonal IUD, not the non-hormonal, and the hormonal implant, they actually make it so your body doesn't even ovulate. Like, even if sperm make it in there, and there's lots of other things they do to try to stop that from happening, but even if the sperm make it there, and they're

looking around for something, there's nothing there. There's no one in the club. Nobody there. So that's the way the hormonal methods work. Primarily, they work by preventing ovulation in the first place. If you don't ovulate, you can't get pregnant because there's nothing to impregnate. To fertilize. Yes. So that's how the hormonal methods work, which is why, sorry, it a lot of times will mimic early pregnancy. So for those of you who are like afraid of hormones, and there are folks who are afraid of hormones because we say things like hormones or abortions, which they're not. We say things like hormones will cause you breast cancer, which they will not oh god i i become very aware of people taking snippets of my work

and so i feel like i just said that phrase and people are just going to take the phrase so i'm going to say it again hormonal methods don't cause breast cancer um but there's a lot of fear of hormones and then for a lot of people who started there's this like oh i'm gonna take hormones and put on 40 pounds and like my life is over and i'll feel like crap i'm like well you may feel like crap for a bit but you shouldn't be putting on 40 pounds yeah um and so my my problem with saying things like this, that the incorrect statement that we started with, that I'm not going to repeat, is that it scares people into not using the most effective methods that we know of to prevent pregnancy. So hormonal IUDs, copper IUDs, if you love the idea of an IUD,

and an IUD is inserted into your uterus, and it is not a pleasant process. I used to work with, at the clinic, I used to work with a male nurse who would tell, he would be like, oh, you'll feel a small pinch i'm like you need to shut the hell up you need to shut the hell up a you don't have those parts b it's not a small pinch and c why we're and and now there's a big outrage now about actually how we're not using pain management like people like we have yeah iud yeah and i will tell you that i have seen pain management being offered more up until recently it's been offered more for white patients than it has been for patients of color, which also reflects our shitty ass racist healthcare system in general. So I was always...

That's a whole nother episode. Yeah. That is actually a whole nother episode. There we go. I always tell my students, I don't care what color you are. I want you to ask for pain management before you go in. And most of the times the people, the places were providing pain management. sorry so hormonal methods like the iud the non-hormonal iud and the implant which goes into your upper arm those are literally these statistically speaking the best methods we have of preventing pregnancy period probably shouldn't say period because you're not going to get your period on some of those pun you know um but if you really want to prevent abortion from happening

you should be making sure people get their hands on these things that's honestly it's the thing I've never understood if you're really anti-abortion like why aren't you helping me get better sex ed like you should be right there in the trenches with me you should be demanding that people understand how bodies work so they can take steps to prevent getting pregnant if they don't want to if you don't want people having abortion you should be right on the front lines with me demanding that we have free cheap i free ideally cheap otherwise access to contraception like where are you with me in this fight if you really want to stop people from having abortions you should be helping me prevent them and i never seen them with me doing this so it's always really

confusing for me well because it's never really about anti-abortion what i know sit down don't don't hurt yourself okay i'm seated don't don't knock me down i think this is something that we've talked about before it's it's never and it's not about anti-abortion it's about pro-birth yeah it's not about pro-life it's about pro-birth because to carry on your argument about if you are anti-abortion why like the the thing that would help achieve that is being pro-contraception being pro-life means throughout the life cycle advocating for life throughout a human's life cycle so a lot of the the movement that we see the mainstream movement that we see around so-called anti-abortion is pro-birth yes and anti-woman yeah it's about control yeah because and i was

just having this conversation with someone else i had some weird ass conversations the last few days the idea that if you force a woman in this country to get pregnant you may be you are increasing her chances of dying yeah so i've never understood and this is true before all the recent legislation like the u.s for a very long time has had the highest the highest maternal maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world which we also have an episode on um and so for me if you're pro-life you should be protecting the life of the mother and forcing her to be pregnant which is a human rights violation actually increases her chances of dying but like you said it's not really about yeah life it's about controlling women because that would also mean you're

considering the impact that you are inflicting upon that child growing up without a mother without their mother yeah so so there's that yeah but yeah i this is it's the thing that always kills me it's like if you if you really want to stop people from having abortions you should be pro sex education good sex education like this is actually how this works the number of people of all genders you cannot explain to me in what point in a woman's cycle she's likely to get pregnant like if you don't even know that for yourself or for your partner how are you properly taking steps to avoid getting pregnant if that's what you don't want right right um they don't know their options. Condoms are not the best option. They're, I don't want to say great. They're better

at preventing STI transmission. They're not great, but they're better at that. But I don't have numbers on that. But in terms of pregnancy prevention, they're not that fantastic. Like the hormonal methods are way better. But if you don't even know those hormonal methods exist, how do you even know to ask for them? So like if you really want women to be in a situation where they're not getting an abortion. You need to be on the front line with me demanding really good, high-quality K-12 sex ed. Sorry, I got a little tripped up on that word there.

Comprehensive sex ed. You should be on the front lines with me demanding that we have access to contraception. I was in a, I don't know, I don't think it's the pharmacy, so I'm not going to name the pharmacy, but I was at a pharmacy in Brooklyn, and the condoms were like you had to ring the button and ask for service for them to come over and unlock it big easy style like yeah like i don't behind like that

pexy plexiglass and then i yeah yeah can you imagine like how many people would already be uncomfortable with the idea of doing that like so so and while condoms aren't exactly the most expensive thing excuse me and external condoms aren't the most expensive things in the world now we've created another barrier like you should be handing that out to everyone who wants them if you really want to prevent abortion you should be handing those suckers out like anywhere you can think of but instead we put it behind lock and key and instead we start making it harder for people to get access to to contraception we close down clinics and in areas where people may not be able to travel to get to their doctors in order to get contraception or

a script for contraception. We put in insurance barriers where insurance is insisting that you go for an exam, which is not always medically necessary. It's just we put barrier after barrier. And my feeling is if you're really anti-abortion, where the hell are you fighting with me on this? Right. Because we could lock arms and drive those numbers right down. Yep. Well, and that's what we find. Well, and that's what we find too, right? With with adequate to better sex education in areas that have that and have access to contraception, we see a drop in unplanned pregnancies. We see a drop in abortions. It's almost like it works. It's like it's, I don't know, provable. Yeah. It's so crazy. Yep.

yeah so yeah um yeah so birth control is not abortion birth control is not well it is when we label it poorly but birth control is not abortion the pills the iuds the implants that they were shipping overseas those are not abortion methods um what you're doing is you're putting people in positions where they may have to choose between bringing another mouth into the family to feed when they can't really do it when we could have given them access to contraception like right or they they know they know that maybe they have a pre-existing condition or there's something about their body where them getting pregnant will kill them quite literally kill them right for a number of reasons outside of the added legislation depending on what area you're in

and the limited access yeah so how do we fix this i guess that's my question well i know how to fix it i know i know how to fix it i mean first of all people people in government i should be held responsible for when they say things that are inaccurate i think oh yeah i think that if you're going to make a statement like that you should be held accountable but that would require a government that wants to hold people accountable yeah the other problem is that some of the things that are being said people don't recognize that they're wrong enough to call them out i mean that comment pissed off a friend of mine um and then i started digging into it i know there are blogs being written about it by some folks that i respect um so we were trying to like make noise

about it some folks were trying to make noise about it but it never quite i mean there's so much going on that it's hard to kind of keep track with all those things. But this isn't the first time that people who have no idea how women's bodies work are making decisions to impact how that impact women's bodies. I mean, and I'm not even talking about Roe v. Wade and how that got overturned because we've already talked about that. I feel like this is just like, we've already talked about that. We've already said, go check out that episode. But like, even looking back, i remember in i want to say in the 80s or 90s there was someone who was like oh if a woman gets pregnant if a woman gets raped and her and she doesn't really want to get pregnant her body has

ways of shutting that down and i'm like and that resurfaced recently within the past within the past 10 years that resurfaced i think it was by a congressman man can i quit now um no we've got too much important work to do dr sue i mean the point is that people who have no idea what they're talking about are making rules and and i see this all the time i mean this isn't just on this we have people making things about vaccines and drug policy and like i mean this is not new we've been doing this for decades regardless of who the president was we've been doing this for decades where poor decisions are being made by folks who don't have basic understanding of it i mean i would love that if you're going to pass a law related to let's be specific women's bodies that

should have to take my test on women's women's anatomy and and i would have to certify you that that you understand enough of what you're saying to be able to pass that law yeah is that a job can you make that a job i would love that job that job would also drive me insane i I think. Yeah. But that'd be tricky right now. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to just highlight some of the vocabulary and their definitions that we've covered. Because one of the things that I do when I voluntarily engage in a discussion with someone who has a different view about abortion or birth control than I do, the first thing I do is I say, okay, let's make sure that as we're having this discussion, we are operating from the same

definition, much like what you do with your students in a semester. Let's have a common definition so we are talking to the same thing. So I think that'd be really helpful here because there are so in my opinion there are so many ways that um that these words get conflated in mainstream and because of how they're used um strategically weaponized um popularized all of those things so i think i think that might be good to kind of clear up and get those what these actually mean yes birth control you mean an oral contraceptive i mean yes oral contraceptive there's a difference there right um i say that because my students after we go through the you will use this term appropriately we'll say birth control pill and i'll look at them and be like

the what and then they have like these flashbacks of oh i gotta correct my english so so oral contraception is a pill that you take once a day ideally at the same time every day it will prevent you from ovulating i'll do a few other things um it's a really popular method especially with my college students really popular method really popular method in the u.s it is not an abortion pill so that's why i like to separate out when we say those words oral contraception is the pill you take so you every day to try to avoid getting pregnant we also have a lot of medical reasons people take it. If you have a really funky cycle and we want to help regulate you, if you've got really disastrous non-functioning PMS symptoms,

we can use pills to help you with that. So pills can be really helpful for lots of medical conditions. An abortion pill, it's usually done with two different medications. It is done when you are already pregnant. It's what we call sometimes a medication abortion. I don't know my brain just froze on that but that is not the pill like when people are like oh i'm taking the pill they're not like throwing back abortion medication they're usually taking their once a day pill um then there's also emergency contraception just to confuse everybody emergency contraception is a pill that you can take um we really love it if you take it as soon as possible after either unplanned pregnancy or like condom broke um you can use can I just be

uh I want to be clear unplanned pregnancy for emergency contraception sorry what did I say you said unplanned pregnancy for emergency like emergency contraception for an unplanned pregnancy no that is not what I meant thank you yeah we're gonna reel that one back um emergency contraception is for um when some unplanned sex is we're planning on having sex and you didn't use any kind of contraception thank you for getting me on that one um or you were using contraception like a condom and the condom broke or you found out that the person was stealthing which we have another episode yeah um so let me clear that up so when someone says they're taking the pill it is not that they're throwing back abortion medicine

They are usually, that means a daily pill that they're taking to prevent getting pregnancy or to handle a medical condition that they may be having. Emergency contraception is a pill that we want you to take ideally within, well, as soon as humanly possible after you had unprotected, that's the word I wanted, unprotected sex. Woo, it's tiring. Unprotected sex or something went funky like condom broke. a medication abortion the abortion pill is something completely different it's taken within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and it is designed to stop a pregnancy those are not the same pills those are three different pills i just talked about so and two of them that you mentioned were contraception yes and to break down that word contra preventative

opposite of of achieving of achieving and conception and conception so preventing implantation

or sometimes even preventing the meeting yes preventing I get sperm from doing dance of love or if they do do the love tango like making sure they have nowhere to implant and I mean this is where it gets a little dicey and I again I'm having been taken out of context recently I want to be really careful about what I'm saying but also knowing people can splice together my words if you believe that life begins

a conception and this is actually why I have my students break down those concepts if you believe that life begins a conception there are some folks who might consider anything that doesn't stop egg and sperm from meeting but does stop it from implanting some folks may consider that to be an abortion so i do i do want to acknowledge that that idea is out there um but for most folks i mean that's really a personal like when do you think life begins and and that's some states have taken a whack at that my favorite are the states that say that personhood begins two weeks before conception and i'm like can is that new math like how how and if if life really begins two weeks before conception does that mean that anytime a man ejaculates in the two weeks prior

to conception that he's like killing potential offspring well i mean that's the age-old question and that's a whole nother there's a whole episode see all these episodes a whole nother branch that we can go down um but i think that what's important here too is that the the actual definition of abortion in this context and that is the termination of pregnancy that means go ahead no no i'm sorry no that's okay um that that means fertilized embryo and abortion is an is a medical term right that's a medical term that's not so it can be applied in so many cases um where it's not an elective right like a miscarriage actually educate educate i had a moment i'm not sure i actually want to spread this because i

don't think i believe it um i just want to tack on that for most of us when we talk about pregnancy and again it's a very different thing based off your faith and your belief system um but most of the time when we talk about pregnancy we're talking about an egg that's been fertilized and implanted so if it is like if something like emergency contraception is stopping it from implanting it then we don't really consider that abortion because the egg hasn't implanted had no shot like yeah you're just kind of floating there yeah um may i you know i'm writing down what i'm supposed to come back to so we won't forget yeah that's okay um in in this article in this hey dr sue article that you posted you have something in here called larks yes use abbreviation

club larks can you tell me what that is i can should i do that now will will you tell me what that is right now right now so a lark is a long acting reversible contraceptive there's that word contraceptive again um i like acronyms when they make sense i've run into some i used to live in dc and there were some acronyms that did not make sense um so i like when acronyms make sense they're long acting reversible contraceptives so these are going to be the two iuds the hormonal iud and the non-hormonal iud and the implant that goes into your upper arm and they are long acting meaning you don't have to take them every day i mean we're looking minimum three years with some of those methods 10 15 years i mean there's there's a lot of legging at that um reversible

because we do not consider sterilization to be sterilization is the number one like you don't want to get pregnant sterilization is the way to do it but again because we control bodies um there are places where if you are a woman who is oh air quotes um who is too young some doctors won't do it because you might change your mind what if you get married yeah that's always the thing when you get married what if you want kids even though i'm sitting here saying no and then i know we've talked about this before but i think it bears repeating because it doesn't just affect one gender um we are we are seeing more men who are being denied vasectomies who are young because there are some men who are like i'll lift the burden like i'm the one who's going to get you

pregnant i'll i'll i'll get snipped and i have a couple of friends who are they're i want to say they're young they're in their like late 20s early 30s which to me is a baby but um they had to shop around to find doctors who would do it because the men the the male doctor and it's so funny because they were so angry i'm like first time welcome yeah welcome to our world welcome to the challenge so so if you really don't want to get pregnant whatever your gender sterilization is the way to go like that's we consider that to be permanent so long acting is going to be not the pill because that's a daily reversible means that we can if you stop using it you can get pregnant and contraceptive means we don't have conception if you don't want

to get pregnant and don't want to get snipped these are the best methods that are on the market and i it's funny because i didn't use the term like i went to a conference i don't know how long ago and they were like using this term lark and i'm like what the lark like it i hadn't been i hadn't been hearing that term yeah and so i wasn't using it in class and then like three months later one of my students came up to me she's like what's a lark and i'm like oh i can answer that question for you and i'm happy to and i did and i said can you tell me where you heard it and she's like my my gynecologist said that i should be using a lark because i'm young and i'm like okay um but what we're finding is that we're seeing increases in areas they did a study in colorado i wasn't

prepped for this so i don't have a lot of the data they did a study in colorado where they were giving out lark methods for free and the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion plummeted oh wow or is it st louis it may have been st louis and now i'm just making things up actually they do a lot of good research out of st louis believe it or not i'm sure they do good research. That's very bad. That's where Johnson and Johnson were based way back in the day. Actually do that. No, I think, I think there was a study out of St. Louis. I want to make sure I'm clearing this up. I think there's a study that was based out of St. Louis, but then there was a program that was being done in Colorado because there were two separate states that were involved

in this and in areas where they were providing clerks for girls in their late teens, early twenties. And I'm using the word girl, but if you have a uterus, whatever your gender, you can get pregnant i'm just going to use the term female or girl here um or young women so for young women in their late teens and early 20s who were being given access to this who had no knowledge that was the thing they were finding like they had to first do the education piece because they weren't getting it in school when they heard about this thing and they were educated on the side effects and they were given it we saw a huge drop in unintended pregnancies and abortions so if you don't want to get pregnant then the larks are going to be your best option

so that oh go ahead i have to see this because i'm an educator but they don't do deadly squat for sti so please use a condom too so the the second part of what you were just talking about um brings a question about like the whole education piece so um can we talk a little bit about why abstinence only education wouldn't work yes we can do you want to stretch first okay so i know i feel like i'm getting a little in the weeds in terminology but i think the terminology is really important here so when we talk about the effectiveness of a method there's two different effectiveness i'm not going to get into what they're called but like one is like in the perfect world where nothing ever goes wrong and we i feel like i want that we all have

the best intentions right and then look out for each other in that world and that's the voice i needed do that again after you're done in a world where where everything goes right um that that's one type of effectiveness the problem is we don't live in that world we don't live in that world there was a really interesting study interesting to me because i'm a dork there was a really interesting study of women who worked in reproductive health and how often they forgot to take their pill oh i i can only imagine it wasn't like you know wasn't disturbingly low but it wasn't perfect and i bring that up because my students are always like well what if i forget to take my pill like that's a really good concern and a valid concern um life happens not that my

students are drinking but you might drink and puke and there goes the pill and you know or you may just forget it or so we've got like the perfect perfect world and then we've got a level of effectiveness that is the real world in the real world where the condom breaks and you don't realize it and you keep having sex by the way that's and that's what we call user failure so method failure is like perfect conditions like everything is great nothing goes wrong except it happens to not work that one time that's not that failure user failure is when we put humans in the mix because we everything up we forget to take pills on time i mean the number of times i have like taken out a vitamin and put it on the counter and done my day and like come back

to it after work yeah i'm like oh that should have been taken this morning yeah so um you know condoms break and you don't realize it and you keep having sex. And so that's where I was going to go with this. If your condom breaks, if you follow the directions, you're supposed to stop what you're doing and get a new one. But if you don't realize it, you didn't feel it, you're too in the moment, you're too drunk, you're too whatever, and you keep having sex, that's your fault. So that's what we consider to be user failure. If you don't take your pill at the same time, you know, plus or minus a few minutes. It's not like if you take it at 10 and you take it at like that's not user failure yeah unless it's like 10 a.m versus 10 p.m um if if you live in

the real world and you fuck it up it's called user failure and so what abstinence only education and what people who often preach abstinence i mean i think abstinence is a great lifestyle it's a great lifestyle choice if that's what you want to do i mean you might go all day without touching other humans who is it bothering right yeah no one but i don't i don't think of it as a contraceptive method like if i ask you what's the safest way to go from point a to point b and you're like oh don't go there's no safe way you haven't given me the safest way to do it not engaging in a behavior is not a safe way to engage in a behavior in my book and so for me when i talk about abortion i'm like okay let's talk about it as if it's an actual contraceptive

method we don't do any education on it right you go when i worked at the reproductive health clinic once you got the method of choice from our our medical staff you sat down with me and i walked you through how to use the method you know whether it was putting on a condom on a model um whether it was like you know how to start a new pill pack whether it was how to take out a patch like we walked through and do education we don't do education on how to be abstinent and that's what that's what really that's where i think abstinence only education fails is that we're just like just say no okay how do i do that how do i say god no go ahead how do i say no when i'm in the moment and we're doing other stuff and it feels really good or how do i say no when

i'm under the influence and i don't have those words how do i say no when my partner looks at me and says if you love me you'll do this and if you don't i'll leave you like we don't teach people how to actually say no so we don't do education on it and so like my i could keep going on the soapbox yeah no my thing my thing there was with abstinence only education um do you i have an assumption and please educate me or correct me but it gets conflated with um non-penetrative a lot of times they don't even talk about our so our course right right the fancy schmancy but i but i think what i think happened may happen is in many um in many listeners my not our listeners but the recipients of this education

and maybe our listeners too and maybe our listeners at some point in their lives but they heard abstinence only um and they equated that with maybe penetrative yes and losing virginity and i know we've talked about that in a previous episode anything that's not the outer course the the different things to avoid the technical penetrative sex um i think perhaps gets conflated with abstinence yeah i don't think that there are teachers going into classrooms being like okay so here's what i want you to do i want you to say no to just penetrative sex feel free to go down on whoever you want like i don't think that that's what the teachers are saying but i don't think that yeah that's how it's being i think that's what yeah i think so

some of the students are hearing um but like in my mind if we were going to really teach people how to do this and i think i think we should i absolutely think we should people teach people how to do this but requires teaching them how to say no in really uncomfortable situations it requires them to understand why that's their choice like if that's your choice good for you how do we get you to stick to your choice because here's the thing if we're going to consider abortion not abortion if we're going to consider abstinence and i can just hear my students like rolling their eyes because like again dr melstein if we're going to consider abstinence to be a contraceptive method we need to realize it fails so if i was planning to be our failure right and

we don't have a i mean i have one that i've cobbled together from a few studies that have talked about it, but I can't find it. It doesn't exist on the contraceptive chart I use, but I look at the other failure rate, user, yeah, failure rates. If you, if you were supposed to take the pill and oops, you forgot and you got pregnant, that is a, we consider that a failure of the pill, but it's a user failure of the pill. If you meant to be abstinent and whoops, you weren't, and you got pregnant, we should be considering that a user failure of abstinence. And so it's not 100 effective and because people are engaging in other behaviors to stay abstinent it definitely does not protect against stis but like we have to we have to admit that it's it's complicated

it's not it's never been as simple as a slogan i haven't seen yeah yeah nothing is no maybe marketable but it's that but the nuance of it all yeah is is and that's and that's part of why why I really enjoy our conversations in our show because to me that's where you find and this is why I love challenging these things is because okay you say this but what do you mean and what motivated you to say this and advocate for this because that's where the meat of it is that's where the motivation like I need to know your motivations I need to know how you got there so that I can understand, like, one, how you see me or a certain community or anything, like, any issue. Like, it helps me understand how to navigate the world.

Yeah. And my interactions. This is a big one, Dr. Sue. have i have have i told the story about the student who wanted to uh not engage in premarital sex because he thought he'd go to hell i don't think you have i think i kind of need to because it fits along with this like how we define things well yeah because abstinent to me also abstinence only education is very moral and contributes to the very taboos that we are trying to combat very much so and all of that purity culture which yeah if we haven't done an episode on we should

we should be writing these down um i i had a student who was i had a sex drive i mean he was normal you know late teenage kid like he wants he had a sex drive but he was he was worried because his idea was that if i have premarital sex i'm gonna go to hell and i'm like okay that's a very strong belief system glad that you understand your values and your morals and then he wrote a the papers i guess he wrote a paper that the way he decided to get around that was by having sex with someone from his youth group in the church. I don't know a lot about religion, but I'm pretty sure that you're not, if you really believed you were going to hell for having premarital sex, I don't think that arrangement protected you. And so that's where we, that's where it has to

go deeper than just here's some words and here's a slogan. That's where it needs to go deeper than just going, that's an abortion method when it's not like we need education and we need, we need explain to people how things work and we need to get into the root i mean i was never going to get into this with him like what what is a sin what isn't and how that works but right like there's a piece for education to help people make decisions and when we make comments that are untrue like iuds birth control uh oral contraceptives and um hormonal implants can be used for abortion there's danger there from people making decisions based off bad information or having decisions in this case the decisions were made for them because the contraception

was destroyed yeah getting back to the heart of of that angry phone call yeah the enforcement on the world of one subsect of the united states is tizzing or inducing i do have to go one more place before we wrap up because i feel like we're getting into wrap-up mode yeah it was about spontaneous abortion so i have always been taught and repeated that the term spontaneous abortion is the term is the medical term or or a more technical term for the term miscarriage i'm sorry i was double checking my facts because that's what you should do and the definitions I found in like dictionary type places only considered abortion to be an elective termination there was no mention of spontaneous abortion there was no mention of

miscarriage and that to me was infuriating that we seem to have changed that um so I did just want to point that out that apparently we may both be wrong i haven't gotten like and a lot of the sources i would normally go to for this i don't necessarily trust anymore so yeah so i just want to clean that one piece up yeah is that what you were writing down earlier that was yeah because i know you said that and then i was like i want to make sure yeah yeah because because i was just and again i was double checking myself because that's what i do i double check my facts except when i'm making up colorado and st louis i'm pretty sure that was accurate though i believe you there we go but like the fact that they removed any mention of miscarriage and the

difference you know there's a difference between people who have a miscarriage although in some states there is no difference there are some states that are holding women criminally liable for having a miscarriage when there's literally nothing that they could do to stop it um but i think that that part getting lost in the conversation can be damaging as well so So I'm glad you pointed that out. That's what I'm here for. That's yes. Among other things, among many other things.

Any other final thoughts, Dr. Sue? Just to fact check, man. Like, sorry, I meant to make that so gendered twice. Well, fact check and, and, and understand the terms. Yeah. and and and then question question the people that are using them and try to listen for how they're weaponizing it for their for their motivations if if i as a seasoned educator with a degree in this can stop and check myself to make sure my definitions are accurate and i

do this every semester before i go into a new before i start talking about new topics i go out and i check my definitions and i make sure my information is still accurate if i'm doing that with my degree in human sexuality education and having written a textbook and doing all the speaking for for decades you can do it too and if you don't know like honestly if you're like i look this up and i'm even more confused or i look this up and i'm getting conflicting information ask us that's what we're here for you have two friends here willing to to help to help out to help clarify well all right how do you how you feel i think a little less angry i'm not really sure how are you feeling i i feel i feel motivated there that's see that's it but

why do you ever come up with answers like that am i literally pissed off or not for a living you have to come up with answers all fucking day and i'm just like meh look at me i'm so poetic don't laugh because if you knock off your headphones I won't throw my head back this time so on that note I want to thank you all for joining us on this episode of unzipping taboos we hope today's episode truly sparked new thoughts will open up conversations worth having and please remember that curiosity is the key to breaking down barriers embracing a healthier understanding of all things, sex and relationships. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who might

need to hear this. And if you've got a question or a topic you want us to dive into, reach out to us via the link in the episode description. A huge thanks to jackandjilladult.com for supporting Unzipping Taboos. Don't forget, you can get 20% off your order with code UNZIPPING20. we want to give a very special shout out to our incredible composer ali o'brien for the theme music thank you so much ali and until next time keep the conversation going keep unzipping those taboos and everyone take care

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