By Hilary White
 
OTTAWA, May 16, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA) has announced that the abortifacient drug, the morning-after pill (MAP), will be available over the counter without either a doctor’s prescription or pharmacist’s oversight being required.

The only regulatory recommendation made by NAPRA is that the drug be stocked close to the pharmacy dispensary so that customers may ask questions if they choose.

Canada is now the fifth country to allow MAP to be sold as an over-the-counter product after Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and India.

The drug, whose generic name is levonorgestrel, is marketed under the brand name “Plan B” in Canada and the US. 

NAPRA has only advisory capacities and provincial and territorial pharmacy regulatory authorities will have the final say over the matter in their own jurisdictions. The possibility that local authorities will place restrictions on the sale of MAP is remote, however, with most local pharmacist and medical organizations having long been in support of plans to make MAP available without prescriptions.
 
Although they are marketed and promoted exclusively as “emergency contraception”, according to manufacturers, morning-after pills work in two ways. One effect is contraceptive, by preventing or delaying ovulation, and the other is abortifacient, by preventing the existing embryo from implanting in the womb. 

Despite this information being available from the drug’s manufacturers, the medical establishment and the regulatory agencies approving its use strenuously deny MAP’s abortifacient property.
 
The disinformation over MAP’s abortifacient property is assisted by the abortion-supporting media who continue to affirm, as did the Globe and Mail this week, that “Plan B is not RU-486, also known as the abortion pill, and it will not terminate an already established pregnancy”. This assertion stems from the work of the abortion lobby in the early 1970s to redefine the term “pregnancy” to mean only that time after which the embryo has implanted in the womb, not, as the medical text books assert, the entire period after the embryo comes into existence.