Quite a significant number of pharmacists prefer to sell the morning after pills only to the actual patient. If you search the net, you’ll find a fair number of stories detailing this phenomenon.
Apparently a recent story has made the news and has a bit of buzz on the blogs. Seems that “Hilary and Jon” had a desire for the morning after pill. They’re not yet married, and apparently not ready to have a baby. Jon was surprised to encounter a female pharmacist who would not sell the drug to him.
Some people have no idea why a pharmacist, who is willing to sell those pills, would make that decision. The girls at Reality Check seem to fall into this group. So Pharmer made an attempt to explain this to them, and added a bit of extra bonus information.
1) Many formerly over the counter remedies have been placed in restricted access due to abuse. All cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine are now behind the pharmacist’s counter, and sales are restricted, because people like to use that chemical to produce methamphetamine.
2) The morning after pills are sometimes abused by males, who give them to females without their consent, sometimes as a chaser to “date rape” drugs. Because of this, it makes sense to restrict the sale of the morning after pills to men. Congratulations to the pharmacist who had enough sense to understand this, and take a stand to protect women.
3) It is misbranding to refer to a drug as “contraception” if it does not significantly stop or delay ovulation during or after the luteal peak (during the most fertile time of the month). Part of its action is due to mechanisms operating after fertilization. The morning after pills are properly classed as “hormonal birth control”, not “contraception”.
4) The morning after pills have shown MUCH less effectiveness than was initially claimed. It makes NO sense for a woman to change sexual behavior due to reliance on the morning after pills. They reduce pregnancy rates by about 60 percent, or LESS.
5) In general, the effect of marketing ulipristal acetate, and levonorgestrel as morning-after-pills will be to stem the decline of the abortion rate. The spectre of increasingly abysmal medical care, overlaid by ever increasing drug shortages has possibly killed the mood for a lot of women, leading to a dip in abortion demand in the U.S. Heavily marketing a poorer quality birth control option might be enough to keep the abortion businesses alive. Levonorgestrel MAP was strongly associated with that effect in Anna Glasier’s Scottish studies.
Pharmer finds the morning after pills to be problematic on a number of levels, ranging from ethics to efficacy, and doesn’t dispense them at all.
