Boots, Britain’s largest chemist, has now apologised (and maybe narrowly avoided a nationwide boycott) for “causing offence and misunderstanding” with its comments to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) about not wanting to lower its price for the morning-after pill (MAP), because it didn’t want to be accused of “incentivising inappropriate use”.
This led to a storm of criticism, including a Labour party letter, signed by Jess Phillips, Yvette Cooper, and Harriet Harman and 32 other female Labour MPs. Phillips later said: “Boots’ justification infantilises women and places a moral judgment on them.” Quite. It’s good that Boots apologised, but a “misunderstanding”?
There was something retrogressive and unnerving about the company’s initial stance. It appeared to have little to do with retail responsibility, and more to do with punishing and penalising women for not only suffering a contraceptive mishap (or being to made to suffer one by their partner), but, also, in the hazy subtext, for indulging in sex purely for sex’s sake. All this, crucially, at a point (post-sex), when (perhaps anxious) women would be in need of a swift, cost-effective, non-judgmental service – not bizarre sermonising from a chemist chain that had been caught out overcharging women for the MAP, compared with prices at other outlets in Britain and the continent.
The “incentivising inappropriate use” phrase spoke volumes – what was this: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with a skin-care aisle (“Make your skin soft for The Ceremony)? The mind boggles at how women responsibly preventing unwanted pregnancies could be considered “inappropriate”. Surely, all the inappropriate women of Boots’ feverish imagination would still be in their inappropriate beds, sleeping off their inappropriate hangovers, not giving an inappropriate damn if they ended up inappropriately pregnant?
No judgment intended but, in this context, dragging yourself to a chemist to sort out emergency contraception would seem to denote a responsible, motivated attitude. Nor do women tend to gobble them like Smarties – I write as someone who’s taken MAPs in the past. Most women are aware that they contain quite a dose of hormones, sometimes with side effects, and it’s probably not a great idea to take them too often. Even if women are not aware, there are pharmacists on hand to consult and, in fairness to Boots, the ones who gave me MAPs were helpful and non-judgmental.
The clue is in the description: “emergency contraception”. When you take it, it’s because you need to and it should not be prohibitively expensive. Boots never had any excuse to price MAPs like precious gold, or saffron, to put women off taking them. It would be a strange and rare woman who yearns to keep taking morning-after pills, because, hey, it’s so fun and easy.
Indeed, where MAPs are concerned, there’s nothing alarming, unseemly, or unusual happening here – it’s just women quietly taking care of business, just as they’ve generally had to, in relation to anything connected with sex and contraception. There are still men out there who think they deserve the Victoria Cross for occasionally deigning to put on a condom. Men who, even taking into account STDs, including “super-gonorrhoea”, still complain, completely without irony, about how condoms “don’t feel nice”.
Women have dealt down the ages not only with myriad devices that make contraception, rightly or wrongly, their sole responsibility (pills, coils, caps), but also with the unwanted pregnancies when it goes wrong. This is all suffused with wider society’s lingering contemptuous and censorious attitude for having the audacity to be female and sexually active (perhaps even a bit sloshed) in the first place.
So, yes, Boots made a mistake – it’s supposed to be a high street chemist, not a moral arbiter where you can also pick up a tube of toothpaste. However, it’s far from being the only (overt and covert) critic of women’s choices in the areas of contraception and sexual behaviour.
