Posts tagged contraception
Access to Emergency Contraception for Adolescents
It is with a great deal of pride that I turn your attention to my hard working wife’s study featured in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). She and her crack research team called every major pharmacy (943 in all) in four major US cities (Nashville, TN; Philadelphia, PA; Cleveland, OH; Austin, TX; and Portland, OR) posing as adolescents who recently had unprotected sex. Not only did her study confirm existing suspicions about significant levels of misinformation about the so-called Plan B medication among pharmacists (with 19% of pharmacists denying access to teenagers), but also found such misinformation to be especially restrictive in low-income communities as regards adolescent access to the medication.
A WBUR (Boston’s NPR station) interview/analysis piece, moreover, nicely sums up the import of the study in light of the Obama administration’s decision last week not to make Plan B available over the counter:
“There’s a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding regarding this medication, and that’s universal,” said Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, a general pediatrics fellow at Boston Medical Center and lead author of a research letter just out online in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “We have a really efficacious form of pregnancy prevention that might not be accessible because of misinformation that’s out there.”
The Dec. 7 Obama administration decision concerned over-the-counter access to Plan B for girls under 17, but the research by Dr. Wilkinson’s team found that even for young women 17 and up, and even for teen girls who have a prescription, getting hold of emergency contraception can be a problem. The administration’s decision was disappointing, she said, but the study found that “even the way things stand is not working.”
