My Persona

My first encounter with birth control occurred 25 years ago when a crabbed nurse presented a diaphragm, an IUD, and the pill as the only choices available to my very frightened and ignorant self. Memory’s eye has the diaphragm large enough to cover not just a cervix but a manhole; that can’t be right, but I couldn’t imagine coping with it. The IUD glistened metallically; no thanks. I’ll take the pill, thank you! After a month I would no longer be able to wear the contact lenses I’d longed for, the hormones had altered the shape of my eyeballs, making lenses painful and ineffective. But no matter. I wanted to have sex more than I wanted to be glasses-free.

Years later, a bit wiser and in a stable relationship, I learned about a birth control system called Persona. In essence, Persona is a take off on the rhythm method. But instead of judging the fertile and non-fertile days of your menstrual cycle by mere calendar approximation, Persona calculates the risk of conception by measuring hormone levels in your urine, which makes it far more reliable (see table). Each day you open up the device, a beauteous, somewhat flattened egg-shaped white case (I kid you not), and check the light. Red – hands off, sweetie, no unprotected sex today; green – go for the gusto, it’s no holds barred!; or yellow, which means more information is needed and you have to do a urine test. On the 8 monthly yellow days you pee on a test stick (which is the gross part) and place it in the unit, which is your own personal mini-spectrophotometer (the totally geekalicious part). Your spectrophotometer then reads the levels of various hormones, stores the information in a mini-computer, compares it to readings it has taken in the past, and then makes a calculation as to where you are in your cycle. Based on that calculation, you get a red or a green light. It’s that simple, and that technically sweet. Because Persona stores your information, and builds up a library of your data, the longer you use it the more accurate it gets at predicting your cycle.

Persona, alas, is not available in the United States. A friend smuggled my unit in from the UK, and I phone up a UK pharmacy to mail-order supplies of test sticks. Why doesn’t the FDA approve it for use in the USA? What with it being Pope-approved and all, you’d think the fundamentalist Christians would be lobbying like hell (so to speak) to have it on our shores so as to help prevent all those abortions that might otherwise take place from unwanted pregnancies. I suppose they think that abstinence (see table) just hasn’t been given a fair shake yet.

If abstinence is not for you, and you are frustrated with the other lousy choices available to straight women (see table), then Persona might be worth your consideration. It does require discipline and cooperation from your partner, but who among us science nerds can resist the technology? Learn more about Persona.

*Does not protect from HIV/AIDs. See River Clinics’ birth control comparison chart for more detailed information on any of these birth control methods, except Persona and Being a Lesbian.