A Money-Saving Tip for Women Who Have Sex With Men

First tip, use birth control. Condoms! IUDs! Pills! Rings! Shots! Those implants in your arm! So many ways. So many options.

But birth control isn’t 100% effective in preventing pregnancy, as you know. And it’s totally ineffective in preventing anxiety about pregnancy. But “am I pregnant anxiety?” is totally fine anxiety because you can find out and end it in mere moments (one to three minutes). And you can do it for cheap! But only if you’re prepared.

Worrying for a week and then finally giving up and leaving work to run across the street to buy a stick to pee on is not being prepared. The cheapest test at the drugstore is like $7, plus $10 lipstick and $8 face wash and $2 gum. Adds up! Not a cost effective way to deal with pregnancy anxiety.

So here is what you do. Here is your prescription for affordable relief to occasional anxiety about the status of your uterus:

Go to the dollar store on any random day. Today! Last week. Tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. Just go there and buy like, 10 pregnancy tests. For a dollar each. That’s ten dollars. Heck buy 20. Buy 20 dollar store pregnancy tests. Keep one in your desk. Keep one in your purse. Keep two! Storage might be a problem. You can figure something out. Stack them on your nightstand (doubles as birth control). Arrange them neatly in a basket. Keep them on your coffee table in a decorative bowl.

Anyway so you have your dollar store pregnancy tests. Then the next time you are in your bed and your stomach hurts and you are thinking, that is probably a zygote, my life is over or at least is going to be very unpleasant and expensive for the next few weeks, you can stop thinking that immediately and go pee in a cup, drip some drops on a stick, and know in 30 seconds. Never buy a $12 rapid response test and pee on this stick at work again. Never spend a whole week doing mental gymnastics about how you’ll pay to get that cluster of cells out of your body or grow them until they’re a tiny human and then deal with that for the rest of your life. Pee on a stick. Pee on a 99-cent stick that you have in your house.

Save money. Save time. Save your mental energy for other anxieties, like would your life really improve drastically if you cut out wheat, or, what is the point of anything at all.

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