The Best Birth Control Is A Piece Of Plastic Lodged Inside Your Uterus

What’s the most aggravating form of birth control? Taking a pill every day for most of your young adulthood or inserting a spindly plastic thingy — otherwise known as an intrauterine device — in your uterus? If you’re not a lady you’d guess the former. But you might be wrong.

So why, you ask, are these little whippersnappers just now making a comeback according to Wired?

It’s just easier! We live in a world in which our computers and smartphones have made it a pain to remember anything. You don’t need to print out directions, you have Google maps. You don’t need to write down dates, your smartphone will alert you when important events come up. We demand efficiency in everyday life. We crave it. So why wouldn’t we want the same from our contraceptives?

Sure, getting an IUD inside of you is no long walk on the beach. In fact, a doctor’s got to measure the depth of your uterus with a thin rod, before very unromantically wedging it inside of you. Once it’s in there, the uterus — which is designed to protect a foetus for all of its nine months in the womb — flips out. It files the IUD under foreign object and treats it accordingly, bombarding it with white blood cells. Conveniently, sperm is also caught in the crossfire. The metal ions on modern copper-containing IUDs also pitch in, dissolving to act as another spermicide.

But after that, you don’t have to think about getting pregnant for 5-10 more years. Not only because you don’t have to think about taking a pill every day, but it’s also about 7 per cent more effective than oral contraception (which often fails because of user error). Just think: no nagging reminder to take your pill, no anxiety attacks when you forget to pick up your prescription on time. Just five years of (hopefully responsible) carefree sex.

And that might just be better than owning an iPhone. Check out the slightly complicated history of this magical little gadget over at Wired.

Photo via Flickr Creative Commons


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