The Birds and Bees

This morning, I attended an interesting quarterly meeting of the Sexual Health Network (of Ontario) that is open to the public, in the North York Civic Centre. The audience was largely members of sexual health clinics, public health workers and sexual health educators.


Advocacy and Birth Control

And to be clear, I mean birth control in the broader sense, an umbrella term for contraceptive methods, plan B, safe abortions, and so on.

It was clarified early on that this meeting would be about advocacy issues that had come up recently, in light of the darkening political climate but also about changes in medications. Here are a couple.

One major challenge, that was brought up by the small sexual health clinics, was that pharmaceutical companies make "minimum order requirements." They will only sell a product if it is bought in bulk which is a significant issue in terms of funding, storage space and expiry dates. They also no longer offer many samples and prices are especially high.

Another issue was around Plan B. A product that is supposed to be made available over the counter has been largely reported as remaining "behind the counter," requiring an intermediary like a pharmacist to issue it. This is a significant problem for accessibility of this time-sensitive medication.

Reproductive Rights?

Perhaps the bigger thing that came out of this talk was about how reproductive rights were no longer what they had been. Taken for granted over the years, we know better than to feel safe in the knowledge that things will remain as they are or improve on their own. The concept of reproductive rights is no longer restrained to simply the issue of abortion or no, is has come to involve birth control, work and pay equality and safety, discrimination and accessibility, environmental health, to name a few. So many health promoting programs are under tremendous threat (if they haven't already been forced to shut down) for loss of funding on municipal, provincial and federal government levels.

There's a lot at stake, so speak out!