Boots

I grew up in a solidly working class community in the 1960s. We were pretty radical in our own way: there were many Communists and Socialists among us, we voted and we often voted Labour, we went to union meetings and night classes and attended lectures by the WEA. We haunted the library. Family life was pretty tranquil. There was no divorce and what separation there was was spoken about in hushed tones. There were things we rarely talked about: violence within families was one; sex was another.

There was evidence all around us that people were having sex. The schools were full of the children of the wartime generation and there weren't enough teachers to teach us all. (The best teacher I had in primary was a woman called Mrs McNab, who had retired years before but came back to help deal with the shortage of teachers. She was so frail, we took it in turns to meet her at the top of the road and carry her bags for her every day). If there was a sexual revolution going on in the 60s, it reached Scotland a lot later than it did Carnaby Street. Contraception was not spoken about above a whisper or in jokes among adults, but from an early age girls knew that pregnancy meant the end of childhood as many young couples then 'had to get married' if the girl got pregnant.

I remember teenage girls in my school and later at university getting agitated because they were 'late.' I remember a few leaving school, their education at an end. A few of my fellow students disappeared, to return months later to take up their education again with no explanation of where they'd been.

And if anyone thinks it got to be easy to get hold of the contraceptive pill, let me tell you that right up to the late 70s, unmarried women were told by their GPs to 'go away and come back with your mother and we'll talk about it.' Just the thing you want to be talking to your mammy about in a highly repressed society. Luckily the family planning clinics didn't take that view.

It is, frankly, a relief that times have changed. Divorce is common and not regarded as a scandal. Living together is the norm. People no longer 'have to get married' and girls and women don't leave their place of education because they're pregnant. Contraception is available from many outlets. In Scotland we used to have a huge problem of teenage girls having babies. I can't find any figures for this online, but it seems to have become less of a problem recently.

Which brings me to Boots. Boots kept the price of Levonelle, the 'morning-after' pill, very high, when retailers (and that's all Boots are - not doctors or pharmacists - just retailers selling us stuff) dropped their prices by half recently. The reasoning of the company was that they didn't want to be accused of "incentivising inappropriate use, and provoking complaints, by significantly reducing the price of this product". So what use, I wonder, would be inappropriate? And who would complain?

We know fine well giving women the right to determine the use of their own bodies has always upset some people. It looks better if we can disguise it as a way to protect 'under-age' girls, although there is absolutely no evidence that girls are using Levonelle. So who is using Levonelle inappropriately? Daft lassies who have had one-night stands? But they're not daft if they're turning up looking for Levonelle next day. Quite responsible, in fact.

That was yesterday's statement, and today Boots rolled back from that position: their spokeswoman (smart move that, putting a woman upfront) seemed to suggest that it might not be safe for women to take Levonelle too often. What's the evidence for that? And it was also suggested that women who need emergency contraception should be tested for STDs. Really? Even in stable relationships? Aren't Boots making a judgement there - again with no evidence? Very paternalistic.

Is this all meant to put women off even asking for Levonelle?

Underneath all this flim-flam there's a serious point to make. I can't say this too often: it's nobody's business how a woman uses her body. So it matters not one bit if there are people who think women should not be having sex outside marriage or one-night stands or even sex at all.

It's time we moved on. We still have a problem with violence inside marriage. The sexual abuse of children. Sex trafficking. All of them a lot more damaging than letting a woman choose to take Levonelle.


PS I haven't mentioned homosexuality here, but I would like to remind people if women hadn't forged the way with feminism from the 80s onwards, there would probably be no equal marriage.