Last week, while at a wedding in Rome, a mistake on my part resulted in complications with my reproductive coil. On my return to London, a quick call to 111 followed by a visit to the urgent care centre sorted the issues, thankfully – but my initial mistake meant I needed to get a new coil fitted.
A call to my GP reminded me just how laborious that process now is for women because of NHS waiting times, a lack of access to the suitable centres and facilities, and the number of practitioners trained to actually do it.
My GP, on the other end of the phone, was hugely apologetic explaining there were no available appointments for a coil fitting for at least a month, so I would have to wait two weeks until a new series of available times were released for the end of November and the start of December.
She apologised again: appointments are twice a week, in the afternoons. Attending an appointment would therefore require taking leave from work and some fast finger action on the phone when the new dates were released. Who knew that taking responsibility for your own reproductive health would be akin to bagging Glasto tickets?
I’m not alone in my experience: some women can see waits of up to 16 weeks for coil appointments. According to a 2020 report by the Advisory Group on Contraception, there has been an 18 per cent decrease in real terms contraception spend since 2015, the number of local authorities reducing sites commissioned to deliver contraception has increased, and this in turn has seen a fall in prescriptions for long-acting reversible contraception, such as the coil.
As far as I was aware, there has not been a gradual decrease in the numbers of women of reproductive age in the UK – I feel fairly certain that if there had been, it would have been a lead story somewhere. Which means there are as many of us in need as ever, but we’re being made to work harder to get it. That is madness.
This could partly be attributed to the stigma and stereotypes attached to looking after your sexual health, as it tends to be talked about as the preserve of those of a younger age. The reality, of course, is that any woman who is of child-bearing age (including those going through the perimenopause, which I am) is acutely aware of their chances of getting accidentally knocked up.
Looking after your sexual health can be filed under the banner of yet another “icky” subject people find uncomfortable to talk about. But it affects just about everyone, whether you are the person with the womb or not. Perhaps if we stopped making each other feel shame for discussing responsible sexual health decisions, we would also realise a wait of up to four months to get a coil fitted is in no way acceptable.
We should never have to feel embarrassed about taking care of our sexual and reproductive health. I remember in my twenties doing the responsible thing and regularly visiting a sexual health clinic off Tottenham Court Road in London to get another prescription for either a pill, or an implant, or an injection, or a coil (I’ve tried most of them I think) – and it was mortifying each and every time.
I would walk in desperately hoping that I wouldn’t know anyone in there. I’d try to make myself physically smaller just so that I didn’t stand out in a room of 20 others all trying to do exactly the same thing.
And if I wasn’t in work that particular day and had to visit a local sexual health clinic? Oh my gosh. My heart would be pounding as I scanned the street before entering and leaving to make sure none of my parents’ friends had spotted me.
The fact that I was in my twenties at this point makes that story ridiculous. But it’s almost ingrained in us as women to feel ashamed of the one thing that shows a level of responsibility and maturity: taking charge of our own sexual health.
Fast forward to my mid-forties, and I genuinely couldn’t care less about talking about my coil, or the fact that my own stupid mistake has left me in this position of needing a new one. Part of me feels that if we speak about it more, the importance of our access to reproductive healthcare may be ignored a bit less.
Rome wasn’t built in a day (see what I did there), and things won’t change overnight. However, when the sexual health rights of women are being taken away in countries far away from here, restricted access to it in England is something to shout from the rooftops. It has an impact on just about all of us.