The Morning-after pill
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
15 Jun 2003
This new proposal should be rejected. Postinor-2 is a dangerous drug, and allowing it to be sold over-the-counter in pharmacies would put drug company profits ahead of the health and safety of women
There are many things women need to know and consider before taking the morning-after pill. A dosage of Postinor-2 consists of a tablets taken 12 hours apart. These two tablets are the equivalent of taking 50 tablets of the 'mini-pill' microlut in one day.
This massive dose of hormones can have serious consequences for a woman's health. Irregular bleeding and nausea are among the common side-effects. For women with hypertension, diabetes, a susceptibility to or history of breast cancer or blood clots, the use of the morning-after pill, especially repeated use, can have serious adverse effects for health.
Already the British Chief Medical Officer has warned that the morning-after pill increases the risk of ectopic pregnancy. It is unclear what effect it might have on the developing reproductive system of teenage girls who take it.
a proper discussion of these issues and the possible effects of using Postinor-2 for any woman requires a discussion of her medical history. There is no way this can be done adequately or appropriately in an over-the-counter pharmacy setting.
It is also difficult to see how a woman can give informed consent to a medication in this situation.
Supporters of this proposal claim that the morning-after pill, as a form of "emergency contraception", provides women with an alternative to abortion. This is misleading.
Many women who take the morning-after pill have neither ovulated nor are about to ovulate, and so they are subjected to this dangerous drug unnecessarily. For a few women it may suppress ovulation and so work contraceptively. But for many women the way it works is by making the wall of the uterus hostile to the implantation of an embryo they have already conceived. Far from being an alternative to abortion it will actually cause an early abortion.
Instead of addressing the issue of why there are such high unwanted pregnancy rates and such high abortion rates in Australia and what can be done to prevent that, this proposal would have our community buy into even more abortion a and now without any medical supervision.
While the success of this application might be good for the manufacturer's profits and shareholders it will be a disaster especially for some women and also for life at its earliest stages.
Women who are worried they might be pregnant deserve much better than this. As a society we have to come up with better ways of helping women in this situation than the dangerous dead-end of over-the-counter "emergency contraception", which often is not contraception at all.
