Tell the FDA to Put All Forms of the Morning-After Pill Over the Counter Now
Tell the Food and Drug Administration: Side with Women and Girls, Not Drug Companies. Put All Forms of the Morning-After Pill Over the Counter.
In June 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally put Plan B One-Step® over the counter without any restrictions. The FDA did this in response to the Tummino v. Hamburg federal court decision in April 2013 which was pushed forward by a decade of grassroots feminist pressure.
The FDA’s action could have brought the U.S. in line with the scientific evidence and over 60 countries around the world that have no age restrictions on the Morning-After Pill.
But instead, the FDA continues to create sexist obstacles to the Morning-After Pill. In July 2013 – just three months after a federal judge condemned the FDA and Health and Human Services for bowing to political pressure – the FDA granted only one manufacturer the exclusive right to sell Plan B One-Step® brand pill over the counter with no age restriction. Generic versions remain behind the counter and also require an I.D. to purchase them. The result: we pay more!
The Morning-After Pill is an important form of birth control that women and girls need at our fingertips. The FDA should side with women and girls, not with drug companies that are making a profit at our expense.
We, the undersigned, demand:1
- The FDA put all Morning-After Pill products over the counter
- Access for all, no restrictions, including cost! If women and girls can’t afford the Morning-After Pill, the government is still restricting access and putting it out of our reach
- Birth control and abortion should be free as part of a national health insurance system
As feminist abortion law repeal movement pioneer, Lucinda Cisler said in 1970: Because no one else [except the Women’s Liberation Movement] is going to cry out against these restrictions, it is up to feminists to make the strongest and most precise demands upon the lawmakers—who ostensibly exist to serve us. We will not accept insults and call them “steps in the right direction.”2
1Email nwl@womensliberation.org your name and address to be added to the petition.
2From “Abortion Law Repeal (Sort of): A Warning to Women.” Lucinda Cisler was chair of the National Organization for Women Taskforce on Reproduction and Its Control (1969-1971) and founder and first secretary of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. More history on the abortion fight at the Redstockings Archives for Action.