Emergency Contraception (EC): Back Up Your Birth Control

In honor of Back Up Your Birth Control Day, I wanted to do a quick post on Emergency Contraception: the myths, the facts.

The Myth: “Abortion Pill”: Anti-Choice groups would have you believe that Emergency Contraception IS an abortion. It is not:

1. The woman is not pregnant: Medical authorities agree that it takes a few days for an egg to become implanted in the lining of the uterus. EC is taken within 120 hours of intercourse, meaning that there is no pregnancy to stop when it is taken.

2. EC = Birth Control: EC is not an abortifacent, it is merely a more concentrated dose of the regular birth control pill a woman would normally take. It is merely a “back-up” in case the original contraception went awry.

3. If the woman IS already pregnant by the time EC is taken, the EC will not disrupt the pregnancy is any way.

The Facts: EC is a Contraceptive Back-Up:

1. EC is safe. Approved by the FDA in 1997, it was deemed to cause no serious side effects.

2. EC reduces the risk of pregnancy by 75% if taken within 120 hours.

3. EC should be over-the-counter for women over 18, according to a 2006 FDA ruling. (Though don’t get me started on this age limit, cutting it off from those young women who are often the most likely to need it.)

According to The New England Journal of Medicine, emergency contraception could prevent as many as 1.7 million of the approximately 3 million unintended pregnancies each year.

The Opponents: Nonetheless, Anti-Choice groups, pharmacists, and religious hospitals deliberately spread misinformation and threaten access to EC:

1. Anti-Choice groups such as American Life League, Human Life International, and Stop Planned Parenthood International oppose EC and have maliciously misinformed a populace that EC is an abortifacent.

2. Individual pharmacists have refused to fill young women’s prescriptions for EC, mistakenly believing it to be an abortifacent.

3. Many Catholic hospitals do not offer EC, even to women who have been raped. A study of the nation’s nearly 600 Catholic hospital emergency rooms found that only 28 percent offered EC to women who had been raped (CFFC, 2002).

For more information, please go to NARAL Pro-Choice New York or Planned Parenthood.

Need EC? Go here quick!

I wonder, what is people’s general sense of EC? Is this information wide-spread, or have you had misconceptions on EC in the past? Where have you heard about EC from? I don’t think I was ever informed about it in my high school sex ed classes…