On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received its first application for an over-the-counter birth control pill.
HRA Pharma, a Perrigo Company, applied for their progestin-only birth control pill to become the first daily birth control pill available in the United States without a prescription.
“This historic application marks a groundbreaking moment in contraceptive access and reproductive equity in the U.S.,” said Frédérique Welgryn, Chief Strategic Operations and Innovation Officer at HRA Pharma, in a statement. “More than 60 years ago, prescription birth control pills in the U.S. empowered women to plan if and when they want to get pregnant. Moving a safe and effective prescription birth control pill to OTC will help even more women and people access contraception without facing unnecessary barriers.”
The application comes shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade. Many on the left believe that the ruling could jeopardize access to contraceptives, despite Justice Samuel Alito writing in the majority decision that abortion access is “fundamentally different” to access to contraception and that the decision only applies to abortion.
“The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of ‘liberty,’” Alito wrote. “Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us describes as an ‘unborn human being.’”
