Yale to offer emergency contraception via vending machine (January Update: No It Won’t)
Photo: Catherine Avalone / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo
NEW HAVEN — Yale University students who want to use the “morning-after pill” soon will have the emergency contraception available via vending machine, the Yale Daily News reports.
The YDN reports that the machine will be “installed in Silliman’s Good Life Center” prior to winter break. The so-called “wellness-to-go” machine also will sell other “over-the-counter medications, condoms” and lubricants, YDN reports.
“The point of this is to make Plan B more accessible and to make medications in general more accessible,” Ileana Valdez ’21, a Yale College Council representative who spearheaded the installation effort, said in the YDN story. “Hopefully this will set a precedent for more machines to show up around campus that contain other things so Yale students don’t have to go out of their way to go to CVS, especially students from the new colleges.”
According to Planned Parenthood, a “levonorgestrel morning-after pill like Plan B One Step, Take Action, My Way, and AfterPill can lower your chance of getting pregnant by 75-89% if you take it within 3 days after unprotected sex.”
“You can take Plan B, My Way, and other levonorgestrel morning-after pills up to 5 days after unprotected sex. But the longer you wait to take it, the less effective it is,” Planned Parenthood reports.
According to the New York Times, some other colleges have vending machines “stocked with the morning-after pill,” including Stanford University, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of California, Davis.
Grace Cheung ’21, who first proposed the idea of a Plan B vending machine last fall, emphasized that unprotected sex frequently occurs on campus and purchasing emergency contraception can be an inconvenient and “humiliating process.” Cheung also noted that documents on the Yale Health website present unclear information about emergency contraception.
Issues about contraception availability remain on the national radar as, for instance, the Trump administration wants to issue regulations that would expand religious and moral exemptions for covering birth control in employer health insurance plans, a move that critics say would limit women’s access to contraception,” according to the Washington Post.
Further, reproductive-rights groups criticized Judge Brett Kavanaugh after “he seemingly referred to some forms of birth control as ‘abortion-inducing drugs’ during his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, Business Insider reported.