Feature

Pharmacy provokes prayers

The availability of emergency contraception at chemists has provoked a new backlash against women’s reproductive choices, reports Diane Lea

On the first of January this year emergency hormonal contraception (EC), better known by its misnomer ‘the morning-after pill’, became an over-the-counter medicine.

The change in licensing applied only to Levonelle-2, a progestogen-only EC. It is available to women aged 16 years and over who, having satisfied the pharmacist that they are at risk of pregnancy, can buy it for £19.99.

Sexual health organisations such as fpa have campaigned for years for easier access to this post-coital method of contraception in the belief that it will reduce the numbers of unplanned pregnancies and abortions. Judged by the Committee on Safety of Medicines and the Medicines Commission to be safe and effective, EC must be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. If unprotected sex happens on a Friday night, 48 hours have already been elapsed before a woman has any chance of getting to her GP or family planning clinic on the Monday.

Pharmacy provision of EC is common sense. Yet when the announcement was made a vociferous moral minority raised its voice in horror. Baroness Young (who fought against equalisation of the homosexual age of consent) tabled ‘a prayer’ against the proposals in the House of Lords.

In the ensuing Lords’ debate, those against said that pharmacy provision of EC would increase ‘fornication and adultery’. By being able to access these pills easily, women would apparently become automatically promiscuous; they would stop using their regular method of contraception; rates of sexually transmitted infections would rise; numbers of abortions would increase and women would have no good reason to refuse sex. They could just pop to the chemist and pick up some pills.

Attempts to control women’s sexuality are not new and politicians both here and abroad are renewing their attempts to restrict women’s reproductive rights.

One of President Bush’s first acts on coming to office was to restrict funds to foreign NGOs that use their own money to either provide, advocate or counsel women about legal abortion services. Organisations which provide reproductive health services to millions of women throughout the world now have to make a choice: stop providing vital abortion services or severely restrict the family planning and sexual health services offered to women in countries where it is still common to die in childbirth or through pregnancy-related illnesses. A week later, shadow health secretary Dr Liam Fox called for a ‘huge restriction if not abolition’ of abortion in Britain.

Abortion, like emergency contraception, is a method of fertility control that a woman might or might not choose but what is important is that the choice remains with women. New methods of contraception are being researched all the time. But at present no method is 100 per cent reliable. Until that is achieved, access to high-quality information and reproductive health services provided by trained professionals remains vital.

Luckily for women in Britain, the unelected men and women in the House of Lords voted by a majority to protect women’s contraceptive choices and Levonelle-2 remains a pharmacy provision medicine. But the fact that the ‘prayer’ to restrict its provision was tabled in the first place is a warning that we cannot be complacent about the reproductive rights we have secured.