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…