Things Just Keep Getting Better for the Morning After Pill
Things are looking up for the morning-after pill. Levonorgestrel, the drug that everyone knows by its commercial name Plan B, has been the mainstay of the morning-after method for quite a while now. The drug is available all over the world, over-the-counter even. But it has always been less than ideal, that the pill can only be of any help if you take it within three days of possible conception after sex. According to the British medical publication, the Lancet, a recent innovation , a drug called Ulipristal Acetate has just gone up for sale in Europe, under the brand name ellaOne, made by HRA Pharma. And it promises to do much better. The researchers followed the cases of more than 1500 women; half of them used the new ellaOne, while the other half used the usual Plan B. The women on ellaOne did one and a half times better. What is more, the women who took the new drug, could get their contraceptive results for two whole extra days longer than Plan B.
The way that this new development in the morning after pill works, it stays just effective for the entire five-day period that it is rated for. Plan B on the other hand, begins to taper off in its effectiveness after the first couple of days. The way the body works, it knows when to start ovulating, by the way it watches the level of the hormone progesterone in the blood. When once a month, the body stops producing this hormone that's the signal it needsto go for it. What the morning after pill Plan B does is, it releases synthetic progesterone in the blood, so that the ovaries gets all mixed up, and put off ovulating. ellaOne works differently. They say that it is more an abortion pill, than a contraceptive, even if it does seem to be pushing it a bit to call a 5-day start a pregnancy. One area in which ellaOne doesn't offer an improvement is in the incidental-effects department. Women who take it, complain of headaches, just as often as women who take Plan B. But the new drug might not really take the world by storm like Plan B has. To begin with, ellaOne is three times as expensive as Plan B. And then, there is the hassle that women need to accept, getting a prescription for the drug each time they need it. It doesn't sell over-the-counter like Plan B. People generally tend to stick with what they can get their hands on easily, even if it isn't as good.
If the pro-choice advocates are happy with ellaOne, they are ecstatic over the new Pentagon policy that every US military base around the world needs to be fully stocked up with the morning after pill. The pro-choice wing had to really fight hard to get Plan B approved for sale over-the-counter four years ago. And now, here is free access to the drug at all military bases. As surprising as it is, it would appear that women's rights groups are getting heard much more than some strident conservative voices.