3.20.2007

Back Up Your Birth Control Day

As the title suggests, today is Back Up Your Birth Control Day, not an officially sanctioned national holiday, but soon to be. Now that I'm a full-fledged feminist blogger, I'm up on all these things. The basic idea here is that emergency contraception is available over the counter for women 18 and up, and thank god for that. Back in my day, we didn't have any fancy emergency contraception--we just had to take a bunch of birth control pills and vomit for 48 hours if we'd had unprotected sex. These kids today don't know how good they have it.

Emergency contraception is not the same thing as the abortion pill. The abortion pill (actually a series of pills) induces a miscarriage. Emergency contraception is essentially a stronger dose of the birth control pill which, if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, prevents you from ovulating, or if you already ovulated prevents the sperm and egg from getting together, or if that's already happened prevents them from implanting. (Can you believe I wrote all that without looking anything up? My mind is a vast repository of useful information.)

Here's a place to go for more information: www.backupyourbirthcontrol.org.

2 comments:

Kaethe said...

Brilliant idea. I'll be happy to spread the word. One cautionary note though, although it has been theorized that EC might prevent implantation, there is no evidence to support this. Given how much prominence the possibility has received, I think it's important to stress that it's never been demonstrated.

Anonymous said...

Mine is in my drawer!