In the Netherlands and surely elsewhere there are phone apps you can use to ask people to pay for their share of things, like dinner or something else that needs to be split up. One twentysomething Dutch woman decided to send her exes a payment request for her birth control pills, with the idea that it remains very odd for women to bear the entire burden for it including paying for it, while men don’t have to do anything.

Until age 21, the Dutch basic insurance covers the pill, but after age 21, you have to pay for it yourself. The price also depends on which pill someone takes. Microgynon 30 is one of the most used pill and costs less than 30 euro a year. An IUD costs between 70 and 150 euro, and the price for having it inserted is between the 250 and 500 euro. If I remember correctly, until recently it was way cheaper to have it inserted.

If a Dutch woman takes the pill for 30 years, that’s still 900 euro she has to pay on her own. That’s not a ridiculous amount, but again why do women have to pay for it themselves? It’s just as much men’s responsibility to make sure that pregnancy does not occur when that’s the plan, and still men have no side effects whatsoever.

The trend in the Netherlands (at least from what I can see as of late) is that women don’t want to be solely responsible for contraception and unwanted pregnancies.

The woman doesn’t send her ex partners a huge bill, but asks for a 1,50 euro contribution. She got reasonable responses and payments from three ex partners. Then again, splitting the cost of condoms is surely also a reasonable request.

Maybe the Dutch are onto something.

(Link: vice.com, Photo by Flickr user Spec-ta-cles, some rights reserved)