We sat down with Yvette Harris, a Community Neighborhood Navigator (CNN) in the Osborn community of Detroit to talk about how taking birth control affected her life for the better.

Yvette offered some real talk about taking birth control. After having her first child at a young age, Yvette began taking birth control which allowed her to plan and achieve big goals for her and her family.

YVETTE: It helped me to prepare and get myself ready before I had another child. So, if I did not take birth control, or was not using any type of method, I probably would’ve had more children and that was not my life goal, nor was that my plan. Because, I promised myself after my first child I was not going to have another child until I was married, or until I was in a steady relationship, or until my oldest child was of the age of eighteen. So I had three different plans.

Unfortunately, I did not wait until she was eighteen. That was really my first, original plan, to wait until she was eighteen. I felt that if I could get her out of the way I could go ahead and start over. And that’s just not a good plan. So that did not work out right.

But, I still was able to plan in between my pregnancies, and make sure that I was ready, and that my husband was ready, as well as my oldest child was ready to become an older sibling.  So that was important to me. And it was important for me to be on my own, to have my own house, to make sure I had the insurance I wanted to have, and everything in place before I decided to have another child.

But I still had goals that I needed to complete. And so, I wanted my life to be more about me, and the two girls that I had, as well as my husband. So, I didn’t want to throw anything else in that. And so I continue to use birth control all the way up until now. So it helped me to complete, to receive my Associates degree, as well as receive my bachelors, and now I’m only, I’ll say about three months away from receiving my masters [degree].

So I just want to say thank you to birth control!