From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/13/plan-b-ruling-available-over-the-counter
For a decade, we have protested and battled in court for Plan B access. Enough with the Obama administration’s delays
Jenny Brown and Stephanie Seguin
guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 May 2013
We have been fighting for a decade for something so basic: for women in America to have easy access to safe and affordable birth control, including the “morning-after pill” (sometimes referred to by the specific drug name of Plan B).
We won a key victory when a federal judge ordered the Obama administration to make the morning-after pill available other over-the-counter – in other words, to make it available without a prescription. Unfortunately, out fight didn’t end there as the administration tried to delay, but last week the courts again ruled on the side of women’s access to birth control, regardless of age.
There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the role the judge is playing in the advancement of pill access. But the nine original plaintiffs in the case aren’t just names on a piece of paper, we are dues-paying members of National Women’s Liberation, and we’ve led a decade-long grassroots campaign to get the pill over-the-counter. The lawsuit was just one of many actions we took in this fight.
While US women have been losing on many other fronts, from the religious exception to birth control coverage in Obamacare to a wave of restrictive state abortion laws, we’ve been steadily gaining ground on the morning-after pill, even if it sometimes feels like Zeno’s dichotomy paradox as we approach the finish line.
In 1999, the morning-after pill was made available in the US by prescription only, a ludicrous requirement for a safe contraceptive that is more effective the more quickly it is taken after unprotected sex.
Still, when we first set out to demand over-the-counter status, we were counseled that we should pursue a more reasonable goal, such as requiring that rape victims be provided the pill in hospitals, a demand that wouldn’t even help most rape victims. Instead, we followed a cardinal rule of the radicals of the 1960′s Women’s Liberation Movement: we demanded what we really wanted, rather than toning down to be respectable.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/13/plan-b-ruling-available-over-the-counter
