A quarterly international newsletter on sexuality, sexual health, and sexuality education.
Volume 2, Issue 2 - Fall/Winter 2002
Emergency Contraception and the “Back Up Your Birth Control” Campaign
Widespread misunderstanding by the public, exacerbated by misinformation by family planning opponents, has prevented women in the United States from having access to emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), a major advance in public health that could reduce the nation’s staggering rates of unintended pregnancies by half.
Medical and public health experts agree that emergency contraception is a safe and effective method of preventing pregnancy after unprotected sex or contraceptive failure.
ECPs are contraception.They work the first 72 hours after sexual intercourse to prevent pregnancy.They contain the same hormones as ordinary birth control pills, which are used by millions of American women every day. ECPs are often confused with abortafacients such as mifepristone or RU-486. Unfortunately, a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that more than 60 percent of women still confuse the two. ECPs have no effect on an established pregnancy.
Women’s health advocates around the United States are working to change this confusion surrounding ECPs. Leaders for women’s health in Congress introduced the Emergency Contraception Education Act in March to instruct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to establish a program to educate heath care providers and the public about emergency contraception. The bill authorizes $10 million each year for five years to carry out this campaign.
Despite the potential for ECPs to secure long-desired public health goals, opponents recently introduced federal legislation attacking them. Specifically, the legislation would deny federal funds to any school district that makes ECPs available to its students at school-based health clinics, deterring adolescents who have had unprotected sex or have experienced a contraceptive failure from seeking the critical services necessary to avoid unintended pregnancy.
The United States lags behind other countries in making ECPs widely available to women. Britain’s largest supermarket chain revealed in March that it was dispensing ECPs free to women under 20 under a pilot project in Weston-super-Mare and Clevedon, two towns in Somerset in western England. Britain recorded 95,000 teenage pregnancies in 2000, and the government had pledged to halve that number by 2010. As part of that effort, EPCs were sold over the counter starting in 2001.
The price of over-the-counter ECPs is $30. Under Britain’s health care system, they are available as a free prescription. Still, many women avoid taking the time to see a doctor because of time constraints. The pill is more effective the sooner it is taken after intercourse.
In addition to the United Kingdom, ECPs are offered to women in Morocco, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Israel, France, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, South Africa, Albania, and parts of Canada without a prescription. In the United States, the states of California and Washington allow women to obtain ECPs directly from trained pharmacists.
Women in Alaska will also soon be able to receive ECPs directly from pharmacists. “We’re right on the precipice of success,” says Dr. Colleen Murphy, a gynecologist in Anchorage. “We’ve got some tremendous, tremendous potential for decreasing the rate of unintended pregnancy.”
In addition to legislative efforts to promote ECPs, more than 100 national and local medical organizations and women’s health advocacy groups have united for a campaign to promote awareness of ECPs. The “Back Up Your Birth Control” campaign is designed to encourage women and their health care providers to make a prescription for ECPs a part of a routine visit. Last year, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended just that standard of care—that its members offer a prescription to their women patients of childbearing age, regardless of current need, to have ECPs available in case of an emergency.
To ensure that every woman who needs ECPs can get them, ACOG and the American Medical Association (AMA) also support making them available without a prescription. Over 70 associations working for access to health care, including the American Public Health Association (APHA), have joined a citizen’s petition pending with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make ECPs available over-the-counter.
More information on the
“Back Up Your Birth Control”
campaign and ECPs is available
at their web site at:
http://www.backupyourbirthcontrol.org
or contact:
Reproductive Health
Technologies Project
1300 19th Street N.W., Second Floor
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202/728-4177
Fax: 202/728-4177
E-mail: rhtp@rhtp.org
Web site: http://www.rhtp.org
There is an automatic, 24-hour-a-day,
toll-free hotline (1-888-NOT-2-LATE
or the Spanish pneumonic, 1-866-entres-
dias) and web site http://www.not-2-late.com.
Both offer guidance on
obtaining ECPs.
Web Master: siecus@siecus.org