Science Gives Us A 5-Days-Later Birth Control Pill
By Tom Miller. Posted on .
I'm sure that all of us have been in this boat before. You have a great night of sex, maybe some Jaeger was involved, and maybe you can't remember where the man's seed finished. Was it in a propho? Was it on the sheets? Was it right in the baby cave? How's someone to remember a thing like that, especially if Goldschlager was used liberally?
Well, per NPR, there is a pill for you. They declare that the FDA is about to approve a drug called Ulipristal (which will be marketed under the name Ella) that can "morning-after" a woman up to five days later.
The clinical study for the drug had a couple of interesting finds: 1) 60 percent of the users were white women. (No men? Really?) 2) Two out of every three were college grads or college-y. And 3) They were mostly between ages 18 and 25. (Check out the NPR link for more details.)
The real punch right in the you-know-what is that the real utility of the pill is as a get-out-of-denial-free card. Evidently, many of the users and projected users of the 5X morning after pill are super-slow to move after having unprotected sex without a successful pullout. And with Ella, the hormone dose is powerful enough to both obstruct ovulation and destruct a fertilized egg. Best Birth Control Options
Though I've never been part of a Plan B project, I understand that some people get pretty sick to their stomachs after ingesting the birth control, and I'd imagine that someone with a massive hangover would probably prefer to avoid this. If you're not responsible enough to use birth control or emergency contraception, it's probably not a great idea to have a kid. So I suppose that a Plan B Part Deux probably is a good idea.
For the life of me, I don't understand how so many unplanned pregnancies happen, especially considering that heavy alcohol use is supposed to lessen fertility. Between the timing and the abundance of birth control products and methodology, you almost have to "accidentally on-purpose" have an out-of-wedlock baby.
Do you buy into the statistic that half the pregnancies in America are unplanned? What do you think of emergency contraception?
