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Think about you’re a 20-year-old girl learning on the College of Washington, and it’s Saturday morning. You’ve simply awoken from an evening out and realized that the push of connection you felt for somebody the earlier night resulted in acts that you simply remorse as we speak. Or perhaps you had been coerced. And even raped. Both method, there was intercourse, and it was unprotected.
In years previous, that second may have had life-altering penalties. On the very least, college students needed to wait till Monday morning to get emergency contraception on the college’s Corridor Well being clinic. And with every passing hour, the possibilities of that treatment efficiently stopping being pregnant decreased.
Immediately, nonetheless, it’s doable for a scholar to move over to Odegaard Library, plunk $12 right into a merchandising machine, and stroll out with a tablet that may guarantee contraception is prevented — due to a bunch of scholars who mobilized to get the merchandising machine put in.
They’re a part of a national effort that has helped get emergency-contraception merchandising machines onto three-dozen campuses in 17 states, together with Washington State College and Jap Washington College.
However on the UW, it took some doing. A consultant of the scholar group Huskies for Reproductive Freedom mentioned the group lobbied college directors for greater than three years. Final fall, the varsity lastly stationed a single merchandising machine within the basement at Odegaard.
Inside three months, it had disbursed greater than 600 bins of emergency contraception, in keeping with a scholar advocate interviewed by Seattle Instances reporter Elise Takahama. All of these gross sales got here by way of word-of-mouth. The college, which later moved the machine as much as the library’s extra seen first flooring, issued three social media posts and a blurb in its student-life e-newsletter. However on the Corridor Well being web site there isn’t any point out of the merchandising machine’s existence, regardless of apparent demand for its merchandise. That’s puzzling and it needs to be remedied instantly.
The entire level of this effort was entry. The campus pharmacy at Corridor Well being is closed after 5 p.m., on weekends and holidays. In the meantime, the clock is ticking.
Emergency contraception, identified colloquially as “the morning-after tablet,” is efficient throughout the first 72 hours after unprotected intercourse, and the earlier the higher. It isn’t treatment abortion. That’s a distinct tablet, which can’t be disbursed with out counseling.
The merchandising machine treatment is a generic model of the model Plan B that’s obtainable over-the-counter at pharmacies. Since girls between the ages of 20 and 24 have the best abortion charges in Washington, anybody taken with seeing fewer of these procedures ought to help efforts round making emergency contraception simply obtainable on faculty campuses.
Anya Fogel, a pacesetter within the scholar group Huskies for Reproductive Freedom, mentioned the assumption that widespread entry already exists is inaccurate. “I feel we are inclined to assume Seattle has a Deliberate Parenthood on each nook, like a Starbucks, and that’s simply not the case.”
Fogel’s group was a part of a campuswide consortium of scholars, college and employees who additionally helped draft laws earmarking $200,000 in state funds to pay for comparable merchandising machines at different public universities, group faculties and technical coaching faculties, beginning in 2024.
That goes properly past younger adults advocating for their very own well being care wants. It’s a heartening instance of scholars utilizing their collective energy to make sure that the identical entry is out there to all.
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