Single, pregnant and panicked

By Laura Beil

updated 8:38 a.m. ET March 16, 2009

The evening began in Chicago at Bin 36, the wine bar that had become Kortney Peagram’s favorite retreat from her merciless workdays. There, over red wine and plates of hummus and pita, she met up with a college buddy in town on business. A portfolio manager at a consulting firm, Peagram, 28, crammed her schedule, leading management-training sessions, teaching at a local university and in her spare time prepping for a marathon. In quiet moments, her mind drifted to an upcoming European ski trip.

Peagram had just gone through a bitter breakup. On that winter night more than a year ago, unloading on an old friend felt good. A few glasses into the evening, her friend confessed that he worried his recent wedding had been a mistake. “I told him it was first-year-marriage syndrome,” Peagram says. She offered him some armchair psychoanalysis, and talk turned back to old times. “What did I do?” he asked. “Why didn’t we date? I just realized you are the one girl I always had fun with.”

Peagram blushed. To break up the awkwardness, she ordered another round. Before she knew it, they were kissing. “He went from friend to lover over intoxication,” she says. “I made a stupid judgment call.”

She opened her eyes at daybreak to sheets so radioactively white they could only be hotel linens. “My mind started racing,” she recalls. “I’m not on the Pill. We hadn’t used a condom. What am I going to do?” She had stopped using birth control pills after her last relationship. She wasn’t having sex; plus, she liked not having to remember to take them.

She stared at her friend’s naked back; he was still lightly snoring. “I had to figure out what I was going to do before he woke up,” she says. She was mortified at having slept with a married man and decided the two should never speak of it.

Despite her panic, it was three days before Peagram could get to the pharmacy for the “morning after” pill, which is most effective when taken within 72 hours. A couple of weeks later, while visiting the doctor for a previously scheduled Pap smear, she had the clinic run a pregnancy test, and it came out negative. But before long, she missed a couple of periods and some days woke to bone-splitting fatigue. Still, the symptoms were easy to rationalize for a sworn vegan training for a marathon. She regressed into weeks of thinking like a teenager, telling herself there was no way the test could have been wrong; she couldn’t possibly be pregnant from one night of desperation sex. Not until she left on her vacation in the Swiss Alps nearly three months later, when little could interfere with the signals coming from her body, did the truth begin to crystallize in her mind.

“On my vacation, I missed my third period,” she says. “In my heart, I knew I was pregnant.” That wasn’t her only problem. One of her sisters, who was collecting Peagram’s mail while she was away, phoned Switzerland; a letter had arrived telling Peagram she had lost her job at the consulting firm.

The day she returned to Chicago, Peagram took a home pregnancy test. She was crying even before she went into the bathroom. She saw the lines: positive. Definitely pregnant. “I believed if I stared at the stick long enough and kept crying, the result would change,” she recalls. She frantically drove from drugstore to drugstore, buying three more tests from three different locations, too embarrassed to hand more than one box at a time to the cashier. Each test gave the same answer.

She crawled into bed, pulled her favorite quilt over her head and thought painfully of her sister Kim in Florida. As irony would have it, Kim had been trying for years to have a baby, and the stress of infertility had taken a toll on her marriage. Divorced and 42, her time seemed to have expired. Yet here was her little sister, pregnant, jobless and eager to find a way out. “For once in my life,” Peagram says, “I felt like a failure.”

Unplanned pregnancies among women in their 20s
This isn’t supposed to happen to smart women. We want to believe that unwed mothers are teenagers who have been careless or clueless. The reality, recently reported by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy in Washington, D.C., is that the majority of unplanned pregnancies and abortions occur among women in their 20s. After little variation during the 1990s, single women in their 20s are also giving birth at higher rates. And contrary to stereotypes, high-income, educated women are by no means immune: Four in 10 of the 1.1 million annual unplanned pregnancies to single twentysomethings occur to women with at least some college education.

Be a birth control stickler Not ready to be a mom? Follow these rules to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. 1. Put pills in your purse. “Inconsistent use of the Pill accounts for almost 1 million unintended pregnancies yearly,” says Mimi Zieman, M.D., clinical associate professor in the department of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University in Atlanta. Time doses to your a.m. coffee or p.m. toothbrushing, refill early and carry them in your handbag in case you forget. When traveling, pack enough for the entire trip. 2. Bring in backup. Missed two or more pills? Use condoms for the next seven days. And always have emergency contraception in your cabinet. “Think of Plan B like Band-Aids: You don’t buy them when you cut yourself; you buy them to have when you need them,” says Katharine O’Connell, M.D., an ob/gyn at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in NYC. 3. Watch for interactions. Antiseizure meds and St. John’s wort can play havoc with the Pill. Talk to your M.D. 4. Learn to love condoms. Safe sex can be less satisfying for women, too, a study from Princeton University in New Jersey finds. Decide what about condoms bothers you — the smell, texture or even what they represent to you, suggests Logan Levkoff, Ph.D., a sexuality educator in NYC. “Condoms come in a variety of scents and sensations. Try experimenting.” 5. Find “the one.” If you’re consistently inconsistent with pills, try a lower-maintenance method such as an IUD or a NuvaRing. “If the first method isn’t a perfect fit, don’t give up!” Dr. O’Connell says. And keep up the condoms for safer sex. 6. Get smart. Too shy to talk with your doc? “Knowing the facts before you visit will help you feel more confident,” Dr. Zieman says. Visit PlannedParenthood.org. —Kelly Mickle

In part, demographics are at work: Young women are less likely to walk down the aisle than women a generation ago but just as likely to be sexually experienced. These days, single women in their 20s often live with their partner, and cohabiting women are especially prone to unplanned pregnancy. Women in their 20s also experience distressingly high rates of sexual violence, which can lead to unwanted pregnancy when sex is coerced or women are bullied into not using birth control. And it’s possible birth rates are up in part because more unmarried women are deciding to keep their babies — 54 percent, up from 41 percent in 1990, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Still, no one can say exactly why, in an era of plentiful information and less stigma about using birth control, young American women keep getting pregnant when they say they don’t want to. Public health experts find it difficult to discuss the issue without appearing to condemn single moms and unmarried couples — many of whom, of course, go on to live happy, fulfilling lives, married or not. “It’s confusing to talk about it,” says Shanti Kulkarni, Ph.D., assistant professor in the department of social work at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “It’s easier to coalesce around this idea that it’s not good for teenagers to get pregnant. It’s not as clear what pregnancy means for the life of a woman in her 20s.”

For some women, surprise motherhood ends up being the blessing of a lifetime. Others choose abortion with no regrets. But the high rate of unintended pregnancy remains distressing, Kulkarni says, because “it suggests that women are not as in control of their sexuality and childbearing as we would hope.”

This month, SELF and the National Campaign are partnering to release a report examining what’s behind all of these surprise pregnancies among single women in their 20s. The organization commissioned a survey asking 2,282 unmarried men and women ages 18 to 29 to share views on contraception, sex and relationships. Then SELF sat in on focus groups as young adults talked about sex and contraception in candid detail.

For starters, we found that single women are much less savvy about birth control than they think. Nearly half of survey respondents said they don’t seek out information on preventing pregnancy because they know enough already. Yet when the National Campaign tested the same group on their knowledge, women scored 6 out of 11 on average and men a dismal 4.7. Why no urgent need to be informed? Researchers found that women are often passive or ambivalent about getting pregnant, with more than one in four saying, “If it happens, it happens” or “It would be no big deal.” Says Sarah Brown, chief executive officer of the National Campaign, “We have a large number of single young adults who say they are not actively seeking pregnancy, but their actions don’t match their words. They’re not really trying, but they’re not really not trying.”

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