NYS Legislature supports Morning After Pill

Well, here’s a rare bright spot in the current too-scary world of birth control and women’s reproductive choices. While many other states are in the midst of restricting access, or passing laws that will allow their pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, New York State has done what I consider to be a very Good Thing, and passed legislation which gives pharmacists and nurses the right to dispense the Morning After Pill to any woman who needs it, using an open prescription written by a doctor. How it works is that a doctor or nurse practitioner (or midwife? I will need to check to see if midwives are among the practioners that are allowed to write these kinds of prescriptions) writes an open (or blanket) prescription for the Morning After Pill with no specific recipient named. The pharamacy or clinic then keeps the prescription on hand, and can use it to dispense the Morning After Pill to any woman who comes to that pharmacy or clinic and needs it. Which is just about as good as having the pill sold over the counter, and probably about as close to that as we can come in this country. The reason this is such a good idea is that the Morning After Pill has a crucial 72 hour deadline, and open prescriptions like this will allow women to obtain the pill when they need it, on weekends or off hours or vacations when it might otherwise be hard to schedule an appointment with their doctor for a prescription. Of course, that’s assuming that Governor Pataki actually chooses to sign this bill into law. Let’s hope that he does.

You can read more about it in a NY Times article here.

This entry was posted in Choice, Contraception, Feminism, Politics, Primary Care. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Trackback

  1. By Belly Tales » O Come All Ye Activists on August 3, 2005 at 3:20 am

    […] Contraception bill which was passed by the legislature back in June. You might recall my gleefull hoots of excitement when I first found out the bill had passed; this bill gives pharmacists and nurs […]

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*
*