I remember with incredible clarity my first experience of taking the morning-after pill. I was 16, in my school uniform, and flanked by my two best mates, who I’d recruited for moral support.
We’d told our mothers we were at some after-school club or another, and trekked over to a neighbouring town on the bus, so as not to be spotted by anyone we knew.
We’d heard stories from other girls on the playground of how the pharmacist would take you into a room and ask you all about your sexual experiences. At the age of 16, barely sexually active and full of British shame about all things body and sex, the embarrassment level provoked by such an idea was off the Richter scale.
My friends and I practised my responses all day during classes, and I remember shaking like a leaf when I reached the counter and asked for it.
The mandatory consultation was excruciating. I was asked loads of personal questions, without much explanation as to why. The male pharmacist asked me about my sexual experience and I was told in no uncertain terms that I needed to be more careful.
After what felt like hours, I was finally released back into the pharmacy, with one pill and a bill for £25 — my cheeks burning with embarrassment.
Mistakes with contraception, I learned on that day, carried punishment of shame for the woman involved. My sexual partner was blissfully unaware of any of this.
The Better for Women report published by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists recommends that this mandatory consultation be abolished.
It also advises that access to emergency contraceptive pills (known colloquially as the morning after pill) should be improved, to ensure that women that could benefit from taking it aren’t deterred by unnecessary procedural hurdles.
As someone who has first-hand experience of these mandatory consultations, I wholeheartedly support this recommendation. The clarity of my memory of first taking the morning after pill speaks to how traumatic it felt, as a young woman, to go through the gruelling process of accessing it.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2017. This time I am 30. It’s the middle of the heat wave and I’m rushing against the clock to find a pharmacy to access the morning after pill
Had I not had two supportive friends willing to come with me, I’m not sure I would have plucked up enough courage to go at all. Knowing what I know now about the trauma involved with terminating an unplanned pregnancy, the thought of any young girl or woman not accessing this resource for any reason other than that too much time has elapsed for it to be effective horrifies me.
That 16-year-old’s experience was not the only time I have had to have one of these consultations, however. Fast-forward to the summer of 2017. This time I am 30. It’s the middle of the heat wave and I’m rushing against the clock to find a pharmacy to access the morning after pill.
Fourteen years have passed, I’ve had many other sexual experiences, and I’ve tried almost every single form of contraception available to me. Unfortunately none of them agree with me, except for condoms, one of which broke during intercourse last night.
The pharmacy opens and I am taken into a room with a pharmacist younger than I and asked if I understand how fertilisation works. I’m asked if I’ve considered other forms of contraception.
This time, I still feel shame, but of the ‘should know better by now’ rather than ‘didn’t know’ variety. I’m sent on my way with some leaflets and a £30 bill. At no point does the pharmacist ask me at what point of my menstrual cycle I am, or explain that this is an important question for someone taking emergency contraception, given that it works by delaying ovulation.
Roughly translated, this means that if someone has already ovulated — like me in this case — eating a breath mint is just as likely to reduce their chance of falling pregnant.
The consultation, it seemed, played little other role than to make me feel ashamed of my poor choices.
It is for this reason that I know we need to get better at talking about sex and contraception more openly as a society.
Education is critical in helping women — and men — to better understand how to prevent an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. This can be achieved more effectively through better sex education and removing the stigma around women’s sexuality that is perpetuated in the media.
If we are going to do away with the consultations – which to be honest, didn’t inform me much – we need to teach women and girls (and men and boys) how this pill works.
For a pill that costs ‘pennies to produce’, according to Clare Murphy at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the price is also a huge barrier for many women. At the age of 16, I spent almost a quarter of my part-time salary from working the tills in a supermarket to access this pill — a cost that I wasn’t able to share.
At the minute we are putting needless barriers between women and the morning after pill — via shame-inducing mandatory consultations or prohibitive pricing. This hurts women and girls, and they deserve much, much better.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/02/i-want-to-buy-the-morning-after-pill-without-feeling-ashamed-11255844/
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