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Don't Worry, Mom
Young people say easier availability of the morning-after pill won't make them careless.
zorik@nyu.edu
With morning-after pill Plan B soon to be sold without a prescription, a debate is raging over whether young single people will grow more careless about having unprotected sex - or whether they’ll just have lots more casual sex, period.
But interviews with people in their teens and twenties back up studies that suggest the pill won’t affect young people’s sexual mores much. Some will still skip any contraceptives, as they do in higher numbers than their elders, but there’s little support for the idea that a whole generation is about to abandon traditional contraceptives en masse.
“People aren’t going to start sleeping around unprotected,” scoffed John Purcell, 22. “There are still STDs and such. It’s insane to think that guys or girls would be more careless just because of the pill.”
“Now that it’s going to be easy to purchase, I’m sure many girls could be somewhat careless about it,” conceded Yuni Iwata, 22, of New York, who has used the pill before. Yet she thinks the sometimes painful process of using it will be “a reminder not to do it again.”
“And even if young women become sexually promiscuous, so what?” protested Annamarya Scaccia, 23, a Brooklyn College student who once tried, unsuccessfully, to buy the pill (but turned out not to be pregnant). “Do we have to be sweet little women who get married and have sex and have children and tend to our husbands’ needs while men could bang Sally, Mary and Harry as much as they would like? It’s misogynist thinking.”
Plan B, produced by Barr Pharmaceuticals subsidiary Duramed, prevents pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. It’s already available via prescription, but in August the FDA-after several years of resistance and much arm-twisting by U.S. Senate Democrats-approved it for nonprescription sales to people over 18. It is to start appearing in drugstores in early 2007.
Some of the loudest objections have come from the Christian right.
“By offering a so-called ‘easy’ option to shirk consequences of non-marital sex, this do-it-yourself abortion only encourages people to become more sexually active with more partners,” wrote policy analyst Alex Mason in a study for the Washington-based Family Policy Network (www.familypolicynetwork.org), a Christian think tank that strongly opposes nonprescription availability of the pill.
But one of the largest studies to investigate the social impact of easier availability, a 2005 study by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, found that teens would use the pill more often, but not give up routine contraception, or increase sexually risky behavior. The study involved 2,117 people, including 964 teenagers.
Dr. James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, agrees that over-the-counter availability is unlikely to alter women’s sexual behavior. He cited this and other studies that divided young women into two groups: in one, women were given the morning after pill to have readily available if needed; those in the other would need a prescription to get it.
“There was no difference in their use,” said Trussell, who maintains the emergency contraceptive website not-2-late.com, and launched the emergency contraceptive hotline 888-not-2-late. “No increase in sexually transmitted infections. No reported sexual risk.” Young people, rather, raise other issues: whether the age threshold is unfair, and whether older men might buy the pill to give underage girls.
“The arbitrarily-determined age restriction is somewhat insidious, because it’s not based on any medical foundation, but was written in just to appease far-right types who see birth control as immoral,” complained Elizabeth Welch, 24, of Austin, TX. “This is particularly bad because it’s those who are under 18 that really should not be having babies, and need access to Plan B perhaps most of all.”
Others worry that men will carry it, to convince underaged girls to have unprotected sex.
“That’s why people are claiming it will be the party favor of choice, said Elina Khasina, 21. “Guys want it to be that way, not the women.” After things went a little too far with a colleague one evening after drinks, Nicole Gwynn, 22, spent a nail-biting holiday weekend trying to find an open clinic where she could get a Plan B prescription. She couldn’t.
“There was nothing I could do,” she recalled. “I went through severe mental trauma.”
She wasn’t pregnant after all. But says she learned from her mistake. In fact, she’s sworn off sex for now.
“Maybe a couple of kids will have sex with the understanding that they can just pop a pill, but it’s not going to be a widespread occurrence,” predicted Rachel Wolfe, 23, a medical student in Johnson City, TN. Even if more do use the pill, she added, “that doesn’t mean that more girls are being promiscuous.”
Nonprescription sales of the morning-after pill Plan B are to begin in early 2007.
Photo courtesy of Duramed Pharmaceuticals