The Morning After

In December 2011 the Obama administration angered many women's health advocates by banning the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraceptives to women under the age of seventeen. Despite a scientific consensus that this drug, known as the “morning-after pill,” was safe to take without a prescription, the contentious politics of reproduction muddied the waters. Heather Munro Prescott's timely book on emergency contraception offers insight into the scientific, historical, and political contexts of this and similar policy decisions. Prescott works to place emergency contraception into an appropriate and broad context, asserting that its history needs to be considered as part of the history of reproductive politics, drug regulation, and contraceptive research. Prescott follows the history of emergency contraception from its appearance in the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. She begins her story with the reproductive scientists and population control groups who sought a way “to address the ‘disease’ of unwanted pregnancy,” a “disease” they considered both social and individual (p. 4). The tension between the demographic and the individual usefulness of emergency contraception suffused its history for the next fifty years. The story is both familiar and frustrating: while scientists and politicians hoped that emergency contraception could be a significant population and poverty reducer, feminists debated about whether it was safe and reliable enough to contribute to women's reproductive autonomy and well-being

Context (archaeology · Criminology · Emergency contraception · Family planning · Pill · Political science · Politics · Population · Poverty · Sociology · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Nursing