Since January 2001, women in Great Britain have been able to buy the emergency contraception drug levonelle from pharmacists without a prescription. Now an anti-abortion group is mounting a legal challenge to this policy that could also threaten the availability of other forms of contraception.
The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Children is challenging the law based on Great Britain’s 1861 Offences Against the Person Act which makes it a crime to sell any “poison or other noxious thing” in order to cause a miscarriage.
Levonelle acts by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting itself in he womb — essentially causing a spontaneous miscarriage. SPUC agues that on that basis the drug should be illegal under the 1861 law.
Of course commonly used birth control drugs operate on the same principle, so if the court agreed with this line of reasoning all chemical birth control might be illegal. As Anne Weyman of the Family Planning Association told the BC,
Their case is about the provision [of emergency contraception] in pharmacies but in fact the same argument would apply to all methods of contraception which can prevent implantation and that would affect every method except barrier methods, sterilization or natural family planning.
So we’re talking here about something like 4.5 million women being told overnight that their method of family planning is illegal.
And beyond that, what exactly would be the legal status of abortion?
This is in the courts now, but a better approach would be for the British Parliament to pass new legislation overturning that part of the 1861 law being used here.
Sources:
Legal challenge to morning-after pill. The BC, February 12, 2002.
Head to head: contraception challenge. The BC, February 12, 2002.