Last week, the New York Times ran "Room for Debate" feature centered on CVS' recent decision to stop selling tobacco products. The question posed was fairly innocuous: "What Unhealthy Products Should CVS Stop Selling?" Three of the four responses were about products that have been proven to pose actual health risks to…
Finally, some good news on efforts to limit women's access to contraception/abortion. Today, Oklahoma District Court Judge Lisa Davis struck down a state law requiring women under the age of 17 to get a prescription for Plan B emergency contraception.
Julia*, a 25-year-old Manhattanite, was perplexed when she was carded at her local Rite Aid last weekend while trying to purchase the morning-after pill. She thought the FDA had recently approved OTC emergency contraception for all ages, so figured she'd be able to buy it with ease; instead, she had to ask an employee…
Plan B One-Step may finally be available over the counter at a pharmacy near you.
Now that the Obama administration has dropped its appeal to keep age restrictions on sales of emergency contraception, it means the aisles of CVS will witness stampedes of wanton sluts eager to get their hussy hands on whore pills while evil drug companies are maniacally laughing as they roll around in a pile of cash…
In another confusing twist in the back-and-forth battle of emergency contraception availability, a federal appeals court in New York ordered that some versions of the morning after pill be made available over-the-counter to women of all ages—for now. Which is good news! (For now.)
It's contraception game time: puritanical fairytale "morals" will go up against the Obamacare birth control mandate over the next few weeks as four different appeals courts decide whether private businesses should be able to object to the policy on the grounds of religious freedom/thinking unchained vaginas are icky.…
Lots of important adults — judges, doctors, the POTUS himself — have fervent opinions on whether the morning-after pill should be available to girls of all ages without a prescription and point-of-sale or age restrictions, yet no one ever asks teenagers themselves what they think. So we did.
As predicted, the government filed a last-second appeal right before today's noon deadline to delay the sale of the morning-after pill to women of any age without a prescription. We can't wait to hear Judge Edward Korman's reaction.
Consistently no-bullshit Federal Judge Edward Korman flat-out denied the government’s request to stay his order pending an appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals today, calling the administration's appeal of a federal court order to make emergency contraception fiiinally over-the-counter for all women “frivolous”…
American women have more than doubled their use of emergency contraception in recent years, thanks mostly to millennials, according to the latest episode of Girls. No, just kidding; we know 11 percent of women have used emergency contraception at least once, up from 4.2 percent in 2002, and that nearly one in four…
When conservative blowhards argue that women should pay for their own damn contraception, they really mean women should pay for their own sluttish decisions; religious right talking heads never tire of asking why employers should subsidize sinful lifestyles. But here's the real question: why should women bear the cost…
Here's a word you should know, if not from listening to the Avenue Q soundtrack until your college roommate threatened to throw the CD out of the window: schadenfreude. It's German, and it means being happy when others meet misfortune. It's a perfect way to describe how I felt when I read that Hobby Lobby, the…
One year ago today, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decided that Plan B was too dangerous to give to teenagers under 17 without a prescription.
Emergency contraception, also known as Plan B, cannot cause an abortion. Yet, religious employers still claim that they shouldn't have to cover it for exactly that reason and high-profile Republicans like Mitt Romney (ha, remember him?) refer to emergency contraception as "abortive pills." Even the Associated Press has…
If you live in Illinois, you better pray super hard that your condom never breaks — or that something even worse transpires — because a state appeals court recently upheld a ruling that exempted pharmacists with religious objections from prescribing emergency contraceptives. Let's hope your friendly local Walgreens…
Giant crafteteria Hobby Lobby has hot glue gun and feathered itself a cool, make-at-home lawsuit that is so easy to put together, even kids can do it. In it, the giant store chain's owners, who are evangelical Christians, claim that the Affordable Care Act's "insurance has to cover birth control, sry" provision violates…
Wheaton College, a private Christian school in Illinois, wishes to be exempt from the Obama administration's newly-enacted birth control insurance mandate, like other religious-run schools and hospitals. But there's one problem: Wheaton doesn't qualify for the exemption, despite the fact that they're adamantly against…
Usually, when the Supreme Court upholds a law, that's it; the law is constitutional. If you want to keep on challenging that ruling, you basically have to make an entirely new law that mandates the opposite of the upheld law and then wait for it to be challenged all the way back to the Supreme Court, and then the…
Just what America needs: more confusion over what birth control actually does. After reports surfaced on Friday that the FDA had quietly changed its description of how contraception works, the agency has clarified that it never changed anything and that all of this hullabaloo about saying that The Pill can't prevent…
