Where have all the condoms gone?

O.k. o.k. I'll admit it. I was trying to buy condoms. I keep telling everyone, who asks how this all got started, that I just 'happened to be walking through Safeway (on 44th and Lowell) and noticed that they had taken all of their condoms off the shelves.' Not true. I wanted to purchase them for myself. Why am I embarrassed to admit this?? I am a 35 year old, married mother of two children. I was just trying to prevent pregnancy after my second (and last) child was born. Since I was still nursing, I had few options for birth control. I shouldn't be embarrassed about this and I shouldn't have been embarrassed about having to ask someone where the condoms were. But I was. But I asked anyway. I was told they were now kept in the pharmacy so I would need to get them there. Uggh. I was in a hurry - the last thing I wanted to do was go to the pharmacy but then I imagined the horror of finding out I was pregnant again before my daughter even started eating solids. I went to the pharmacy. There was a line. This was ridiculous, I decided. I put my package of English Muffins (my condom decoy - because you really can't just go in and buy nothing but condoms) back on the shelf and left, annoyed and frustrated. My husband and I would just have to resort to watching reruns of 'The Office' in our sweats tonight after we put the kids to bed. (and we did).

I went home thinking about my Safeway experience over the next couple of days and began to get angrier and angrier. I thought about how if I, as a responsible adult, balked at asking someone for condoms and then just gave up, rather than stand in a pharmacy line with old people getting their blood pressure meds - then what about horny highschool boys? Or girls? Or college students who have their whole lives ahead of them and just want to get through graduation without STDs or babies to weigh them down? Then I thought about how the pharmacy has limited hours and what you do if you go in after the pharmacy is closed? I decided to do more investigating. I went to another Safeway (this one on 26th and Federal) and asked to speak to a manager. She told me that the condoms had been removed due to theft. Huh? What does this say about our society that people are reduced to committing a crime to obtain birth control - and then having even that option taken away? And aren't they like, $7 at most? Anywho - she said that if the pharmacy is closed then they move 'some condoms' to the Customer Service desk. But wait! Don't they close? Yes, they do. Then you have to page a manager.

So here is what happens if I walk into Northwest Denver Safeways at 9:00 p.m. I go to the condom shelf, find that they have been removed, go to the pharmacy, find it closed, go to the customer service desk, find it closed. Then if I am still persistent enough to ask someone what the hell I'm supposed to do - they have to page a manager who then 'helps' me with my purchase under a watchful eye. The condoms really may have well just been removed from the store all together. Does this make any sense? Is this happening elsewhere? Why are we trying to teach our children to practice safe sex and then taking that option away? Shouldn't these things be as easy to purchase as toilet paper or dog chews? These are the things that were going through my mind when I watched Barack Obama's nominaton speech downtown. The moment he said "We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country" I knew what I needed to do. I decided to start a letter writing campaign. Now you have to go read that blog.