Erin Miller

Much of the work that I do in Honduras involves educating women about possible birth control options. I tend to begin my “birth control spiel” by asking women how many children they have, followed by asking them how many they want in total. It is often the first time that these women have ever been asked to think about how many children they want. It’s the first time that someone has posed the subject as a choice. The women get confused and don’t know how to answer so I usually volunteer something like, “For example, I want three children. But the mother of the family I am living with here thinks that is too many. Many women only want to have one or two children.” The women usually laugh at this. They ask me how many children I have now. I respond that I do not yet have even one child. They ask me how old I am, and when I answer 23, they are shocked and confused. “Why?” they ask. I tell them that my boyfriend and I use birth control because we are not ready for children yet. I tell them that I wanted time to travel here to work with them and that I still want to go to another two years of school.
The other day, when I explained this to a group of women in the pourperio (the area in the hospital where women recover after giving birth) one of the women sat up and said, “You could still have a child, you could just do what everyone here does and strap him to your back and go about your traveling and studying.” Everyone got a huge laugh out of this. I explained that I understood that was how women did it here, and that I admired their strength, but that for me, it would just be too difficult. Children can be a lot of work, and women should decide how many they want to have, and when they want to have them.