| Popis: |
This chapter describes an emergency contraception (EC) movement of nearly two decades in the United States, driven by an eclectic mix of reproductive health activists who sought to expand the range of contraceptive choices and opposed by conservative politicians and religious activists who portrayed EC as a technology of moral degeneracy. The EC movement in the United States can be heuristically divided into two stages. The first stage involved activism dedicated toward raising EC awareness among healthcare providers and women, as well as efforts to get a dedicated emergency contraceptive pill (ECP) on the market. Although oral contraceptive pills (OCPs) had been used off-label post-coitally for years, reproductive health activists realized that a dedicated product would increase awareness of EC and lend the method popular legitimacy. However, existing pharmaceutical companies did not think that a dedicated ECP was profitable enough to develop and distribute, in part because of a legacy of health scares and controversy associated with an earlier version of post-coital contraception, diethylstilbestrol. In the late 1990s, activists launched their own pharmaceutical companies to bring two different versions of dedicated ECPs to the US market. |
