, and of course I support all birth control pills going over the counter. The key to know is that not all pills are the same. There are 40 different birth control pills in there, and the one that has applied to go over the counter is a progesterone-only pill.
And then the next pill that’s up for going over the counter is a 20 microgram pill, and as I just said, if you’re under 30 years old, we don’t recommend less than 30 micrograms of estrogen for your bone health.
Number one is the copper IUD. The most recent study that did a head-to-head with the copper IUD and the levonorgestrel IUD standard dose 52 milligrams, showed zero out of 300-plus people that used the copper IUD for emergency contraception got pregnant. With the levonorgestrel, it was like three out of 313—and so the good news is if you were to show up in the ER and you needed emergency contraception, you could throw down a copper IUD and there’s almost zero chance of you getting pregnant.
And then lastly, if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere and all you’ve got is a bunch of birth control pills that have either levonorgestrel or norgestrel in it, generally you can take four pills now, four pills in 12 hours—but again, all these other ones are much better options, but if you’ve got nothing else and you’re alone and you can’t get to a doctor within the next five days to get whatever you need, then that is an option.
So you want emergency contraception just sitting in the corner waiting for the emergency to happen, because you want it there when you have a fire to put out the fire so you can save the situation.
Are they opt in or opt out? And for example, one company was like, I’m going to write this prescription for female condoms and I’m going to send it to your house unless you stop me, so generally not a good idea. More like, would you like some emergency contraception? Okay. This is the one we recommend. Okay. You’re good with that? We’ll bill your insurance. We’ll send it to you, but not I’m going to send this to you unless you tell me.
And as you all know, we get our first period at 12 and a half and we get our last period at 50. Why are we building up the lining? Every time you build up that lining, it can mutate and turn into endometrial or uterine cancer. Every time you pop out an egg, you risk ovarian cancer, and actually by being on the pill/patch/ring for five years, you decrease your risk of ovarian cancer by 50 percent.