Book Group: Just Get on the Pill

Book discussion led by Rev. Sally Fritsche, Associate Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana Champaign

Just Get on the Pill, by Krystale E. Littlejohn, Associate of Professor at University of Oregon

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The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends  approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely  do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken  for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial. In Just Get on the Pill,  a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn  investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and  gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and  providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to  socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the  burden for preventing pregnancy.   

Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a  phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for  preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She  shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and  poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women  are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed  by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also  negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in  overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy  prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor  in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.