The day when the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, Julie Crowe, in Nashville, Tennessee, immediately went online to order ten emergency contraceptive pills.
At 52, she is not the only one to have reacted to this historic volte-face on June 24. In order to avoid being taken aback and for fear of future restrictions in their respective states, many Americans rushed to acquire the morning after pill, sometimes by the dozens.
Read also: Abortion rights revoked in the United States: a look back at this darkly historic day
Historical spike in sales of emergency contraceptive products
Within 24 hours of the ruling, online drug platform Wisp saw an all-time sales spike of 3,000% on its emergency contraceptive products. This upward trend continued for several days, breaking record after record, before stabilizing.
However, health professionals advise against buying the morning after pill — a single-dose contraceptive — in multiple copies. This measure, they judge, is at best useless, and at worst, counterproductive.
Julie Crowe was curious to see if her very conservative state of Tennessee was doing “block delivery” pills. But above all, she wanted to be able to help anyone around her who wanted to take over “control over his life”. “It is completely mind-blowing to see our country going backwards in terms of civil rights and the autonomy of its body”, she told theAFP.
The morning-after pill is different from other products that allow a so-called medical abortion to be carried out much later in pregnancy. It is taken in one dose within five days of unprotected sex. The sooner it is taken, the more effective it is.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, calls from citizens to stock up on morning-after pills forced e-commerce giant Amazon and top US pharmaceutical chain CVS to briefly cap purchases.
Limited quantities of the morning after pill in pharmacies
If reproductive health professionals and Planned Parenthood recommend having a pill in your medicine cabinet ” in case “, on the other hand, they advise against building up a reserve at home.
The idea of not being able to terminate an unwanted pregnancy can cause some people to “a very visceral feeling of having your body used against your will”, told theAFP Hayley McMahon, researcher in reproductive health in the United States.
But, faced with limited quantities in each pharmacy, “nobody wants to empty the stock of a trade when one of these pills could have helped the next customer” who wouldn’t have the luxury of waiting, she explains.
Hayley McMahon believes that this rush is favored by online misinformation and confusion between the morning after pill and the abortion pill, making it possible to perform an abortion. Some states banned the latter pills in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. But emergency contraceptives are not affected by any ban in the United States.
In Boston, a morning-after pill dispenser on a college campus
Savannah Norvell, a nanny from Richmond, E. Virginia, ordered six morning-after pills online to distribute to people in need — she lives in a working-class neighborhood with a high student population. Access to reproductive health is a very personal struggle for the young woman, who resorted to abortion after being raped at 18. She “was ashamed” and felt alone. She didn’t know where to get an emergency pill, before it was too late.
Well-meaning but ill-advised people like her who are building up these reserves, doctors say.
“As long as emergency contraceptives are available in stores, it is not beneficial for citizens to send these pills by private mail to other people in different states”, explains Caroline Moreau, reproductive health specialist at Johns Hopkins University.
“No need to reinvent the system”, according to specialist Hayley McMahon, who applauds the work of local organizations to keep these products easily accessible.
A collective of Boston University students recently installed a morning-after pill dispenser on its campus, and hopes to be able to extend the initiative elsewhere.
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