New Delhi:
"I took the pill within the first few hours. I still ended up getting pregnant,'' says a young woman who wants to remain anonymous.
Yet, emergency contraceptives or the morning-after pills are so popular now in India that they outsell birth control pills and even condoms. "These ads are completely misleading people. They don't emphasise the word emergency. In our clinic, we see people who are using it 2-3 times in one cycle. They are treating it as regular contraceptive,'' explains Dr. Nitika Trehan, a gynecologist at Trinity Healthcare Centre.
That's why the Drug Controller General of India wants guidelines for advertisements for emergency contraceptives to be enforced by the end of this month. The new ads are meant to share details of side effects and explain basic do's and don'ts for usage.
Drug manufacturers maintain there is no dearth of information. "There's a website, a call centre, which has a toll free number, there's a packaging set in the I-Pill pack which is there in nine languages, about the correct uses of the EC pill,'' says Dr. Jaideep Gogtay, the Medical Director of CIPLA.
Health experts say what must be stressed is that the morning-after pill is for emergency, and not regular use. "It's unfortunate that a perfectly good technology which can be safely used, which can be empowering for women, which can prevent a large number of unwanted pregnancies, is being misused because women don't have full information," says Dr Saroj Pachauri, Asia Regional Director of the Population Council.