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Why should anyone other than women care? Why is this so much more than pushing a "feminist agenda" – which, in this instance, is just women wanting equal rights over their body, by the way? To get the morning pill sorted out, it's a case of researching pharmacies and sexual health clinics, going around town, getting turned away, travelling to other ones, sitting in a waiting room all day. Women often have to take time off work, school or university and pretend to be ill to get it, which has obvious knock-on effects. If women have to see their GP to try to get it for free because they can't at their pharmacy, they're using up an emergency appointment, which could be used for someone who actually needs that time. In many cases, with GPs ridiculously overworked, that's not even possible. If a woman with kids who cannot afford to pay for the emergency contraception has to pay for it, that deficit puts her children at risk of going without.On a wider scale, the cost of abortions or unwanted pregnancies is far greater to the state and taxpayer than giving someone a free pill. There's the added stress and associated burdens that come as a result of those two circumstances. Presumably, many of the men who commented on the original article wouldn't want to deal with the burden of an unwanted pregnancy?The reason people commented so angrily on that article is in part the same reason women are frantically having to travel around their city to find anywhere that'll give the morning after pill to them for free: because there's a lack of standardisation. How is it right that one lucky woman can get free access to the morning after pill, if every factor (pharmacists being in, pharmacies being open, being able to take a sick day and so on) aligns, but other women elsewhere have to risk unwanted pregnancy? There are far too many obstacles in place that prevent it from being accessible. To say that we have free contraception in the UK – something that's taken as a given with the NHS – is not true, and it won't be true until the morning after pill is free behind the counter for every woman who needs it.
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