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
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
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
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
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
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…
If you ask any of the bazillion "pro-life" dudes who bravely stand for zygotes by standing against emergency contraception, they'll tell you that the morning after pill — or Plan B if you want to get brand-namey — is an abortifacient because it prevents fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman's uterus. The FDA will…
Zygotes are more important than women, but money is more important than zygotes. At least if you're Mitt Romney. The staunchly unstable politician, who holds the mistaken (but convenient) belief that the morning after pill causes abortions, will be holding a big, fancy fundraiser at the Florida home of the chairman of…
Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that a proposed law in Alabama would require women who take the morning after pill to do so in the presence of a physician. This story was repeated across multiple sources, including here. But the bill itself actually isn't about the morning after pill at all — it's about…
Yesterday, an Alabama Senate panel approved a measure that will require women who take the morning after pill to do so in the presence of a physician. The pill's available over the counter to women 17 and over and it could not be simpler to take unless you absorbed it by thinking spermy thoughts, so either Alabama…
A new study has unearthed something in the world of pharmacy more depressing than filled pediatric cancer-fighting prescriptions that never get picked up: it appears that across the country, pill-dispensing professionals are giving teenage girls misinformation about the morning after pill's legality and availability.…
There's been yet another setback in the battle over access to contraception. A federal judge today ruled that Washington state cannot require pharmacists to dispense emergency contraceptives to customers if doing so goes against their religious beliefs. Judge Ronald B. Leighton said the regulation that required…
A Pennsylvania university is causing a stir by offering Plan B at a vending machine in its health center. Beyond the pearl-clutching, though, this may raise some real concerns.
Last month CVS apologized
Though Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA's recommendation to give everyone access to Plan B without a prescription, the battle to make the drug more widely available for women of all ages isn't over. The Center For Reproductive Rights has reopened its 6-year-old New York lawsuit,…
Students at New Jersey's Ramapo College say their school makes it unreasonably difficult to get Plan B — they say they have to make an appointment and sometimes discuss their sex practices with a clinician in order to get the medicine. They want a Plan B policy more like The College of New Jersey's — so we decided to…
Drug store chain CVS has issued an apology to a man who says he was denied access to Plan B and a pregnancy test because he lacks a uterus. By this logic, women shouldn't be allowed to buy men's razors, condoms, or Gold Bond powder, unless they can produce evidence that the Gold Bond powder is not to be used on balls.
