You Can Buy the Morning After Pill On eBay For a Fiver

The old Morning After Pill Routine is known to almost every woman partial to P-in-V in the western world: going down to a pharmacist on your lunch break, asking for it behind the counter, then a lengthy awkward chat in the back room about whether the condom broke. If lucky, you get the pill for free and a little cup of water. If unlucky, you leave the room empty handed and buy the pill for nearly £30 over the counter anyway – if you can afford it. No wonder you can buy the morning after pill on eBay for around a fiver. If you go on the American site and search for "emergency contraceptive" you'll find various sellers offering different brands – the cheapest of which is for $9, the equivalent of around £5-6. Many of these ship worldwide. In a Daily Mail investigation, the reporters ordered the pill from different sellers to the UK. In this country, it's only legitimately available from GPs, sexual health clinics and pharmacists.

With the expense and inconvenience of the availability of emergency contraception it's little wonder that the internet has provided a solution. Clare Murphy from BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service) told VICE these two obstructions are what the charity is worried about. "Yes, emergency contraception can be obtained for free from GPs and in family planning clinics but urgent appointments can be difficult to obtain and women with work and childcare commitments do not have hours to spare hanging around walk-in centres," she said.

"The answer is not so much to clamp down on the unregulated sellers but to demand more affordable access to this medication in pharmacies so that no one needs to purchase pills on eBay," she added. "For many women the cost of emergency contraception – which can be priced at £35 – is a huge amount of money. And, of course, the cost usually falls entirely to women." Only a matter of weeks ago, it was revealed that British women are charged five times more than their European peers for emergency contraception. French women are paying as little as £5.50 – the same cost as the ones on eBay. The irony hasn't gone unnoticed. "These pills are actually being sold online at pretty much the cost we think they should be sold at in pharmacies," Murphy said.

The majority of people will be concerned by the safety of buying pills from eBay. While the sellers are unknown and unregulated, and purchasing emergency contraception over the internet from illegitimate sites is never advised, BPAS are more worried about timings – these pills from eBay can take up to two weeks to arrive and with emergency contraception, time is key. This implies that women are stocking up on pills, just in case.

The answer is a clear one: an affordable emergency contraception that women can pick up from the pharmacy shelf. "There is no need for a face-to-face consultation with a pharmacist unless a woman wishes further advice and information," says Murphy. "This should of course be available but entirely optional. Research by BPAS shows many women find the consultation embarrassing and off-putting."

An eBay spokesperson told Daily Mail that the morning after pill was being sold to British women by mistake and should only be available in the US where laws are different. A spokesman for watchdog the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said: "We take the illegal sale of medicines online very seriously and will investigate any report received that medicines are being offered in circumstances that do not comply with UK requirements." The spokesman stressed it was the sellers acting illegally, rather than eBay for listing the products. The response of eBay was to make sure that these products wouldn't come up if searching through the UK site.

The wider point is that until these pills are more easily available for all women, they'll always be able to be found through the internet somewhere.

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Why British Women Pay More For the Morning After Pill

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