Misuse of morning-after pill and personal responsibility

Caroline, now 20, was 16 years old when she first took the morning-after pill. Since then, she has taken it on at least 15 other occasions. "I don't want to, but it just ends up happening anyway," she says.

Of course it does.

A peculiar article was published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on the 24th of January. It stated that women are misusing morning-after pills by using them as ordinary contraceptives, rather than as the emergency contraceptives that they are. And that the result of a market survey was "buried by the directors of (the manufacturer) Nycomed", as well as that the "staff was gagged". The not-too-subtle implication is that the manufacturers are to be blamed because young women do not listen to the advice they receive or read the instructions on packaging before taking such pills. The next step is fairly predictable. As so often happens in Sweden, this article will almost certainly form the basis of some future legislative proposal on the restriction of access to morning-after pills, perhaps even the formulation of some means of punishing the manufacturer, "in order to protect young women from falling into abuse." The motive would be that since the morning-after pill is having no effect on the increasing numbers of abortions then it is of no use and thus access can be restricted. It would really be a shame if this were to happen.

Another thought occurred to me: isn't it strange that it is always the young and irresponsible who get such items for free (i.e., paid for by taxpayers), while responsible people who work their fingers to the bone have to pay for them? I had no idea that the pills were free for "youths" before I read the article. Caroline, above, says that "it just happens". It most certainly does not. She is quite simply irresponsible. And since she began using morning-after pills when she was as young as 16 years old then one would expect that she would have learnt a thing or two about how to protect herself after all these years.

I remember seeing my mother throw out her contraceptive pills when I was about 7 years old, on the advice of her doctor. She was approaching 30, and the doctor had reminded her of the risks of taking the pill (before and) after a certain age, i.e., that there was an increased risk of being afflicted by cancer and blood clots. She received the same advice regarding the contraceptive injections that she sometimes got every three months. My parents went back to using condoms. In school (sexual education, between the ages of 8 and 12), we learnt that the earlier a woman/girl went on the pill (e.g. as a teenager) and the longer she continued to take it (e.g. into her 30s), the greater the odds of that woman experiencing the more serious side effects of the drug. All of this happened nearly 25 years ago, in a country that was then referred to as a developing/underdeveloped country.

If we were so well-informed on the matter 20 - 30 years ago, how is it that women of today, in what is routinely called "the information age" and in so-called industrialised countries claim to be ignorant of the dangers to which they expose their bodies, to such an extent that they even file lawsuits against the manufacturers for having "caused their cancer"?

10 - 15 years from now when Caroline is ready to have a child and cannot conceive naturally - since she would have decreased or ruined her chances through her irresponsible behaviour - she will come running to the taxpayers to demand that they pay for her artificial insemination treatments, without a thought that she might bear some responsibility for the fate that has befallen her. It will be even worse if she is diagnosed with cancer or various other health problems at an early age. She will hardly believe that contraceptive pills (morning-after or otherwise) could be the cause, despite the fact that the warnings are clearly stated on each package. Will anyone dare to remind her? In Sweden? Not bloody likely.