Last December the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an official position paper concluding that the time had come for birth-control pills to be sold over the counter. It was the first time the group had endorsed such sales, concluding that scientific evidence suggested that the practice was safe and calling it “a potential way to improve contraceptive access and use, and possibly decrease the unintended pregnancy rate.”
Finally! This is really great news. The ridiculous and completely barbaric practice of forcing women into needless and costly OB-GYN visits whenever we need contraceptive pills has got to go and now even the retrograde American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agrees.
When oral contraceptives begin to be sold freely, women will finally be able to have backup packs of pills for when one gets lost (or one pill gets lost which makes the entire packet useless.) And we will be able to travel without offering long, humiliating explanations at the pharmacy for why we need our pills 2 days earlier than the pharmacists thinks we do.
Now, of course, we will get even more proof of whether the fetus defenders really care about saving fetuses (as some very intelligent people still insist on believing):
The goal of the proposal, of course, is to make birth-control pills more readily available. “The biggest barrier to adherence is the logistics of a prescription — you run out on a Saturday night, you lose your pills, you go on vacation, you can’t get a doctor’s appointment,” said Daniel Grossman, a gynecologist who is a vice president at Ibis Reproductive Health, a nonprofit research organization.
In his group’s studies, about one-third of the women who were using no birth control or a less effective method said they would use the pill if it were available without a prescription. “This is what women want,” Dr. Grossman added.
Do you think anti-choicers will rally to make oral contraceptives more easily available to prevent abortions? Yeah, right. We all know they will be howling against this abortion-preventing measure like a pack of rabid stinky dogs.
So if you know this mythical “really nice person who genuinely cares about fetuses and opposes abortion rights not because s/he hates women but because s/he is such a bleeding heart”, do ask yourself why this “nice” freakazoid is not supporting this measure. And then ask yourself what drives your need to believe that anti-choicers are not woman-haters.
Clarissa's Blog 
Amen!
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Yes, please!
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This post comes the day after I couldn’t pick up my monthly prescription at CVS on time, and they tell me that “insurance will only allow it to refill every 30 days.” But it’s a 28-day pack.
I think the CVS is just being dumb, because obviously that wouldn’t work starting the second month, but now I have to start it 3 to 4 days late? Yeah, that sounds like a great idea for preventing unwanted pregnancies…
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I feel your pain, my friend! I have had so many of these ridiculous situations.
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Not having the pill available over the counter is absurd. Sure, there are some people who don’t react well to oral contraceptives, but for someone unaffected by the few increased risk factors, the bad reactions are going to be obvious and more on the side of inconvenience than harm.
A question, by the way: how much does 28 days’ supply of oral contraceptives cost in USA? I paid 8 dollars per packet of Yasmin 4 years ago in Romania, all out-of-pocket. This was affordable for all but the poorest women, in a country far poorer than the US. I hear, however, a lot of noise about mandating employers to offer access to the pill through their insurance, and the arguments seem to be 10% “it’s ridiculous to deny access to essential medicine” and 90% “people aren’t able to afford it otherwise”. Is this propaganda, is this based on the fact that you need a doctor to prescribe it and an out-of-insurance appointment with one would be prohibitively expensive, or does the same Bayer-made not-that-new drug have wildly different prices on the two sides of the Atlantic?
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I get mine through Planned Parenthood, so the pills themselves are dirt cheap. But I can’t get them without seeing a physician, which even in their clinics (which charge according to income) costs me close to two days’ pay. And I’m at extremely low risk for health problems including stds. Even to get refills every three months they want me to go in, to make sure the pill didn’t kill me or something. And this doctor made me change to a different formulation that she prefers and thinks is safer, despite my having been on the same version of the pill blissfully for ten years. The new one messes up my periods, but at least I won’t get pregnant, I guess. Hooray for life in America without insurance!
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“Hooray for life in America without insurance!”
– The most essential simple things turns into a high-cost and high-stress endeavor for absolutely no reason. In the years when I traveled a lot between the US and Canada, I had the constant stress of trying to figure out where I will be geographically at the time when I’d need a new prescription. And given that it’s easier to get another PhD than to get an OB-GYN appointment in Quebec, I was worrying about this all the time.
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Wow, that’s a waste of both your time and money and a trained professional’s time. Once every 3 months, too. I really hope they get their heads straight and start selling them OTC.
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In Canada, I had to pay $30 a month for the pill. (I’m a citizen.) I think that is very ridiculous. Especially with the kind of taxes people pay there.
In the US, it depends on your insurance. On my insurance with Yale, I had to pay $120 up front at the beginning of the year and then $7 a month. On the insurance I have now, I paid $7 a month.
But without the insurance, it would be $30-$40 a month. This might be more than somebody who is, say, unemployed or a teenager have.
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Weird that it’s so expensive. I mean, I know things are generally more expensive in the US, but I didn’t expect a 5-fold increase.
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There is a huge concerted effort in the US to make access to female contraception as difficult as possible. This is ideology more than economics, I believe.
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It’s about a woman-hating retarded ideology.
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It’s the nature god. One simply must worship the nature god. If something happens according to nature, it is meant to be. Medusa must be worshiped.
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I can’t believe the naivete of those who repeat, “One can oppose abortion rights and still be a good person.” No, one really can’t. These are horrible, woman-hating creatures who hide behind a lot of empty verbiage about “saving babies.” In the meanwhile, none of these freaks ever did anything to help any real babies. Anti-choicers are all jerks and deserve to be thrown on the trash-heap of humanity.
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Yes, unfortunately it is a problem endemic in the Western world, that people view their piety as a force unto itself, independent of existing social circumstances.
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