WP auto-escapes post data?

While working with POST data on a WP plugin i’m noticing that it’s escaping the data automatically. This would be fine if I were putting it straight into the database, but because I’m checking it for errors first, this becomes annoying. I know I could use stripslashes but i’d rather not have to do that on all the post data when it’s being displayed on the screen again.. does anyone know how to stop this?