I Wore A Purity Ring As A Teen — But I Was Keeping A Secret

“I want you to write down the name of every single person you’ve had unprotected sex with.” The nurse held out a pen. She was stern and no-nonsense. I didn’t even consider lying to her.

I was at a publicly funded sexual health clinic beside my town’s mall. I wished I was eating frozen yogurt and shopping for boot-cut jeans. Instead, I was writing down the name of every guy I had slept with, my cheeks reddening under the nurse’s cool stare.

It was 2007 and at 17, I’d already been sexually active for two years and with multiple partners. I had rarely used a condom. I fiddled with the purity ring I wore on a chain around my neck while I recounted each person I’d slept with. I tried to think of it as a math problem, 3 + 7 = howthehelldidIgethere?

“You need to go on the pill,” the Nurse said. “I’m sending you home with a prescription, and you’ll start taking it today and every day after that.”

I already disclosed that I wasn’t on birth control and rarely used protection, and that I’d taken Plan B close to a dozen times. I didn’t disclose that I was trying to be pure and holy — I wanted God to love me and boys to respect me. I had renewed my virginity with a prayer too many times to count, but I knew that Jesus forgave all of my sins. If I went on the birth control pill, or stashed condoms in my purse, then I’d be admitting defeat in my battle to abstain from sex.

“I don’t care how many Plan B pills you pop,” the nurse said, seemingly reading my mind. “You’ll take those pills, or you’ll wind up in my clinic getting an abortion.” She didn’t even mention HIV or any other sexually transmitted infections, all of which I had been just tested for.

I walked out of the clinic with my prescription for birth control pills, which I did fill and started taking. The nurse may have been tough on me, but she never once told me: “You have to stop having sex.” She didn’t make me feel ashamed. She just wanted me to be safe. In all my years as a teenager, I’d never been taught about safe sex. I had just been told not to have any sex at all.

At 11 years old, I committed my life to Jesus at Vacation Bible School at my local Baptist church in Ontario, Canada. Soon after, I was sitting through youth presentations about purity and abstinence. The evangelical “purity movement” of the 1990s and early 2000s was its own unique cultural moment. In 1994, thousands of teens gathered in Washington, D.C. to announce their commitment to wait to have sex until marriage. It’s estimated that 2.5 million students pledged to “remain pure” through the True Love Waits movement, founded by male leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention — a group rocked by sexual abuse scandals in recent years.

I wore my purity ring, highlighted Bible verses about sexual purity in my Teen Bible, and kept my beloved dog-eared copy of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” by Joshua Harris — a book that advocated for purposeful, supervised courtship instead of dating — on my bedside table. I was told constantly by youth pastors that masturbation was a sin, and that to engage in premarital sex would mean “cheating on my future husband” and “destroying my purity.”

I wasn’t taught about safe sex, consent or how to heal from childhood sexual trauma. Nobody told me what to do when a youth pastor privately messaged me when I was in the sixth grade and told me that he struggled with “sexual sin” and masturbation. I wasn’t taught that having consensual sex as a teenager was a normal, fairly common occurrence.

As a result, I wasn’t well-equipped to tell someone no when they propositioned me for sex. While I sat through hours of sermons on the joys of married sex, I never once learned about sexual coercion or how to protect myself from predators. I didn’t know, until I was in my 30s, that childhood sexual abuse quite literally changes the brain. I didn’t understand that my past trauma left me at higher risk for engaging in risky sex and abusive situations.

I also felt overwhelming, all-consuming shame when I had consensual, pleasurable sexual encounters. I thought that I was dirty, used up and unclean, and that it would be nearly impossible to find a good man to love me and marry me.

My entire framework around sex was to be both obsessed with it — the evangelical church could not stop talking about it — but told that to engage in sex was completely off-limits.

It’s been over 30 years since the True Love Waits phenomenon was first started, and 20 years since I became a sexually active, shame-filled 15-year-old. Still, not much has changed.

With Donald Trump’s inauguration fast approaching, and conservatism on the rise, we can expect even more calls for abstinence and a lack of effective and proper sex education. Sex Ed for Social Change documents the sexual education policies within the U.S. The organization states that 35 states require their schools to emphasize the importance of abstinence; 17 states provide abstinence-only sex education. Meanwhile, there is a mountain of evidence and research that suggests comprehensive, inclusive sex education leads to more positive and healthier outcomes for teens.

In 2007 I sat in a sexual health clinic surrounded by other teens like me — some who were already pregnant and waiting for their abortions, others who were having STI-testing or being sternly and kindly educated by health care providers.

When I look back on my teenage self, I don’t feel any shame or embarrassment about the decisions I made. Instead, I am amazed at the gumption, courage and strength it took to take care of my own sexual health the only way that I knew how. Taking Plan B as often as I did definitely saved me from unwanted pregnancies. And eventually going on the pill, learning more about safe sex and getting therapy helped me to embrace a much healthier view of sex.

It terrifies me to think that young women in the States, and even my own country of Canada, could be subject to far more conservative, close-minded policies, which will have a direct impact on their lives. A teenager who is taught abstinence only, and has no access to Plan B, or abortion care, is one who is set up for failure in a system that surely won’t institute policies that protect or support her — or any child she is forced to birth.

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