Where do babies come from again?

Last Saturday night Madrid hosted its third annual Noche en Blanco (White Night). Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Madrid to enjoy the many free outdoor concerts, museum open houses and other cultural activities which took place under the watchful eye of the full moon. Qué bonito…

I wasn’t able to attend any of these activities because my husband and I were helping some good (guiri) friends put together an Ikea sofa after a move (ok fine, I was hanging out with my friend Martha while our significant others put the sofa together, but still). Apparently we missed out on all sorts of cultural funfare, including a touching tribute to the Oscar winning Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar. But that was nothing compared with the most important Noche en Blanco moment lived by so many madrileños: that crazy beautiful, ever so magical moment when they had sex with some other culturally minded soul they just met. Apparently culture wasn’t the only thing being given away for free that night. How do I know this if I wasn’t even there? Because a few days after the Noche en Blanco, a report was released stating that requests for the morning after pill from Madrid hospitals literally DOUBLED the day after the Noche en Blanco!

This news struck me at the time, but when you couple it with the tidbit I heard on the radio this morning while I was getting ready for work, you’ve got a pretty serious situation on your hands. Studies show that 40% of Spanish couples use absolutely no birth control whatsoever and an additional 21% practice what the journalist called “coitus interruptus”, which is really just a fancy term for what my middle school sex ed teacher referred to as “pulling out”. The aforementioned method is apparently the third most used “birth control” method in Spain and is the method of choice for 33% of sexually active Spanish teens. Of course, there were no statistics about how many of these couples were in loving, monogamous relationships, but we all know that many of them are not. I can only imagine that the majority of those post Noche en Blanco pill goers were not necessarily planning on having sex that night; otherwise they probably would have taken measures to protect themselves from disease and unwanted pregnancy.

All jokes aside, I find this extremely concerning. Are Spanish men and women (and American men and women, for that matter, just look at our sky high abortion rates) really that uninformed or are they just irresponsible? In one article, an expert chocks the problem up to “lack of information and difficult access to contraceptives”. But everywhere I look there are ads for condoms, which are sold in all pharmacies and the bathrooms of many bars. With the number of 24 hour pharmacies in the center of Madrid, one can only come to the conclusion that people just don’t care.