Making an emergency appointment with a doctor, filling a prescription or even getting to a family planning clinic within a 72-hour window is not always possible for women-especially over holidays and weekends when doctors are difficult to come by.
It's even harder when pharmacies refuse to fill prescriptions.
Plan B, an emergency contraceptive pill, vastly increases a woman's chances of preventing pregnancy and preemptively eliminates the painful decisions women endure in the face of an unplanned pregnancy.
Of course emergency contraception has its opponents, including anti-abortion groups, the Vatican (which opposes any interference with human eggs) and Wal-Mart.
The retail giant has refused to carry the pill in its pharmacies-except in Illinois and, as of yesterday, in Massachusetts where pharmacies are legally bound to provide the drug.
Conservative arguments against the morning-after-pill that liken the medication to an "early abortion" are entirely moot. If a pregnancy is already established, the morning-after-pill has no effect-thus allowing the drug some escape from the conservative bombardment against the "abortion pill," RU-486.
According to CNN, widespread use of emergency contraception in the United States could prevent up to 1.5 million unintended pregnancies and 700,000 abortions each year.
Since the pill has FDA aproval, why not make it readily available to women?
Wal-Mart representatives claim that they are indeed concerned with women's health. I have no doubt that they think they are being sincere. But Wal-Mart is not willing to make the pill available in all 50 states. Instead, the company has waited for state and federal directives mandating its compliance with its duty to provide common medications.
If Wal-Mart really cared about women's health, this would not be an issue.
Individual pharmacists throughout the United States have objected to providing women with access to the drug. But regardless of personal convictions, they are, after all, pharmacists and they have to do their job.
A favorite dissenting opinion of mine is that greater access to emergency contraception will invariably lead to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
But what, pray tell, are the grounds for that assumption?
There is no evidence that greater access to emergency contraception makes women increasingly careless about safe sex or more negligent with other methods of contraception. It is unfair and demeaning to assume that women will stop having safe and responsible sex given greater access to emergency contraception.
Honestly-there is nothing like women's reproductive issues to get the American public talking about women's capacity to take care of their bodies.
Women deserve to be as informed as is necessary to make responsible decisions. They deserve as much access to as many reproductive options and resources as possible. And most importantly, women must be trusted to make wise decisions about their own bodies.
So Wal-Mart needs to make the drug available in all of its pharmacies.
It is not just a retailer. Its a freakin' pharmacy, and as such, it has a responsibility to dispense medications quickly and discreetly to those who need them. If Wal-Mart really does not want to carry Plan B, it should stop claiming that its drug aisle is a pharmacy.
Boston Cote is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every Friday.
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