A Bitter Pill For The Moral Majority
For the first time, Irish women can purchase emergency contraception over the counter. It’s a safe, effective and widely used form of birth control – and yet some people are kicking up a fuss.
Valerie Flynn, 04 Feb 2011
Ireland, not for the first time – and probably not for the last – is playing catch-up when it comes to sexual health. Let’s compare and contrast with, say, Britain.
Emergency contraception came on the British market in 1984, at a time when, in Ireland, condoms were only legally available with a prescription (thanks, Charlie Haughey). By the time the Irish Medicines Board got around to licensing emergency contraception as a prescription-only drug in 2001, the same product was available over the counter in Britain.
Now, 10 years later, emergency contraception is finally available over the counter in Ireland – thanks to a British company, Boots. Considering Ireland’s illustrious history of making contraception stupidly difficult to access, it’s not surprising that this move has met with a bit of backlash.
The Irish Independent’s ultra-Catholic, David Quinn, took the opportunity for a few pot-shots at “young, single women who were out on the tear over the weekend”, denouncing them as the category who are most likely to “show up at a family planning clinic on a Monday morning.”
Young, single women having sex!? How terrible. They’re probably even enjoying it, the filthy, boozed-up slags. Quinn went on to despair of “how we ever got to a point where there is such demand for a product like this.”
Answers on a postcard to Independent House, Talbot Street, Dublin 1: no need to enclose actual burst condoms.
Okay okay, it’s easy to take the piss out of the nut-bag religious right. In fact, the most determined opposition to Boots’ move has been much more nuanced, and has come from an apparently ‘secular’ source: the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP). This influential organisation’s spokesman, Dr Mel Bates, was all over the media for a couple of weeks there, explaining why Boots should be stopped in its tracks.
The impression that many radio listeners or newspaper readers may have come away with is that the GPs’ representative body was casting aspersions on either the safety of the ‘morning after’ pill itself, or on pharmacists’ ability to provide it.
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