By ANONYMOUS
My elderly aunt and I talked on the phone last week.
We had both watched the same documentary about midwives and the conversation turned to pregnancy and childbirth.
“You know, we didn’t know how to not have babies when we were young, your Nan and I”, she said.
“In the city [Melbourne], we just didn’t know how to stop it.” [I made some non-committal noises, hoping Aunty wasn’t going to talk at length again about how Nan’s prolapsed bladder used to fall out and she had to poke it back in again. I had only just eaten dinner.]
“In the country, in Bendigo, they knew how to stop getting pregnant.” [“Really?” I said, starting to check my emails.]
“In the country, they knew that you should soak a sponge in vinegar and put it up in there, and you wouldn’t get pregnant”. [Splutter. “What? Why? With what? In there? Oh, god, that’s horrible!”].
“Well, we had no other choice.”
And that, my friends, was the first time that I wished that my aunt had actually talked about Nan’s prolapsed bladder.
The idea that Australian women in the 1950s had to resort to putting salad dressing in their Lady Garden to manage their own fertility is pretty grim: women had so little choice and felt so very trapped.
But in some parts of the world, in our region in fact, this is still a reality for many women. There are women in the world today who are still not informed about contraception and other family planning options – and that lack of knowledge is often fatal.