Finding EC is not easy.

In phone calls to the emergency departments of all U.S. Catholic hospitals in 2002, a researcher posing as a woman in need of emergency contraception learned that 55% of these facilities do not provide the method, 29% provide it with restrictions and 5% provide it on request. (1) Among a nonrandom sample of non-Catholic hospitals the researcher called in 2003, 42% do not provide the method, 37% provide it in some situations and 17% provide it on request. (The remaining hospitals did not or could not answer the question.) Among hospitals that restrict access, 79% of Catholic and 45% of other facilities said that emergency contraception is provided only to women who have been sexually assaulted, 19% and 44% that provision is up to the discretion of the physician on duty, and 2% and 11% that a woman has to take a pregnancy test before obtaining the method. About half of each type of hospital referred the caller elsewhere, but most of these did not know whether the referral facility provides emergency contraception. The majority of referrals (65% of those from Catholic and 80% from non-Catholic hospitals) led to dead ends-wrong numbers, clinics that were closed on weekends or facilities that did not provide the method.

(1.) Harrison T, Availability of emergency contraception: a survey of hospital emergency department staff, Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2005, 46(2): 105-110.

FYI is compiled and written by Dore Hollander, executive editor of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.