Chicago Women’s Group Starts Morning-After Pill Web Site

Planned Parenthood of Chicago has launched a campaign to promote its online prescription service for the morning-after birth control pill with advertisements in bar toilets and on drink coasters.

The ads show a sperm cell and a computer mouse with the words, “The race is on.”

So far, the service is available only in Illinois and Georgia. Women enter information on a Web site that is then reviewed by a nurse practitioner before the prescription is sent to a pharmacy of the woman’s choice.

The pills prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse. They’ve been available in the United States by prescription since 1998.

Planned Parenthood of Chicago hopes the new service--for which it charges $40, not including the price of the pills--will boost orders from women who don’t want to or can’t wait to go to their doctors. The pills generally cost from $15 to $30.

Forty-seven Planned Parenthood affiliates already provide prescriptions by phone. The online service is expected to remove a critical barrier for women in rural communities, said Steve Trombley, president of the Chicago chapter of Planned Parenthood, which started the online service in January and has granted more than 500 prescriptions.

“We’re talking about hours here, and hours matter,” Trombley said.

The Illinois Department of Professional Regulation is investigating whether the Web site violates the state’s Medical Practice Act because drugs are being prescribed without a consultation with a doctor, agency spokesman Tony Sanders said.

“Our position is it doesn’t matter what the drug is,” Sanders said. “If it’s a prescription drug, you can’t prescribe it to somebody unless you have a relationship to them.”

Trombley said Planned Parenthood looked at the legality of everything it is doing, saying it meets the standards of appropriate medical care.

Planned Parenthood of Georgia has been advertising its online service since it became available last summer. Agency officials there say online access to the pills is important because requests can be made 24 hours a day.

“If a woman gets online in the middle of the night and finds the Web site, it can be an incentive to getting the process started,” said Leola Reis, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Atlanta.

Even so, a Web-based way to help women deal with unwanted pregnancies presents “some additional challenges” to efforts to prevent unsafe sex by possibly lowering condom use, said Tonya Ehrmann, spokeswoman for AIDS Action in Washington.

The National Right to Life Committee said in a written statement that the organization “takes no position on the prevention” of a pregnancy before fertilization occurs.