From preventing STIs to making family planning easier, there's a lot of reasons to thank your birth control for. If you're feeling extra grateful toward your IUD birth control, condom, birth control pills or diaphragm today is “Thanks Birth Control” Day. Today is also the start of Lifestyles Condoms partnership with the online birth control support network, Bedsider, who are now joining forces to promote this special day with the digital campaign, #ThxBirthControl.
For the sake of the holiday, and to promote birth control option awareness, Lifestyles and Bedsider are asking you to take to social media, sharing the hashtag, along with your reasoning or personal experience in support of diversified birth control methods. Lifestyles and Bedsider have also created an #ThxBirthControl e-card to share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, or via e-mail for even more shareable awareness.
“Education surrounding safe sex is a huge focus for our company and community, which is why we're eager to partner with Bedsider for their #ThxBirthControl campaign and to engage and educate consumers in a whole new way,” Carol Carrozza, Vice President of North American Marketing for Ansell, the makers of Lifestyle Condoms, said in a recent press release. “By partnering with an organization that shares our dedication to safe sex, we hope to raise awareness of becoming familiar with various methods and using birth control.”
To further their birth control awareness efforts, Lifestyles is also collaborating with Bedsider for their “Bedsider U” campaign, which involves 224 student ambassadors across 30 U.S. colleges and Universities distributing over 75,000 Lifestyle Condoms to students. The operation started October 30, and is already fully underway.
As for me, I can't help but be extremely thankful for birth control too. Being on the Pill for the past few years has not only given me power over my sex life, it's helped to ease my menstrual cramps and make my periods shorter.
But there are plenty of other reasons to scream from the hilltops why you love your go-to BC method, and here are just a few I've found courtesy of the #ThxBirthControl campaign.
1. Family Planning
Choosing the birth control that works for you can help you and your partner plan potential pregnancies for the times in your lives when you're ready to have children. But that's just one of the many ways birth control gives us a choice over our bodies and the course of our lives.
2. Promoting Women's Equality
When we look at the history of female empowerment, birth control, especially the pill, was always at the forefront of promoting female sexual liberation, and a woman's power to choose. Not only did birth control help reduce the wage gap (that one comes to you from our friends at Planned Parenthood) it allowed women to choose their futures, go further in their careers, and live their lives the way they want while remaining sexually active.
3. Keeping Us Safe
Birth control is one of our greatest achievements when it comes to human health, because it stops the spread of disease. Thanks to some of the most popular methods, like condoms, birth control prevents the spread of STIs that can cause serious health implications like cancer, infertility, and in some cases, death.
4. Giving Options To Everyone
One of the best things about birth control is that it comes in so many shapes, forms, and sizes that suit your lifestyle, and your needs. There's a form of birth control out there for just about everyone, but it's our duty to teach the public more about how to use forms of BC, and make them more readily available.
5. Freedom To Choose
Most importantly, thanks to birth control, we have the power to choose what the future holds for us. Want to spend your days traveling or climbing the career ladder? Go for it. Can't have kids now because you've got student loans to pay? That's fine to. Whatever your situation, birth control allows you to make decisions that suit your hear and now, while also helping what comes next.
Image: Andrew Zaeh/Bustle
