The Toronto Star reports that Candian pharmacies are requiring women to fill out questionnaires about their sexual activity, sexual history, and pesonal identifying information – to be stored permanently in the pharmacy computers – before dispensing emergency contraception. They charge an extra fee for this non-optional service, doubling the cost of the prescription. They claim the information is to be used to monitor women’s patterns of use of EC “for counseling purposes.”

Canadian pharmacists are being advised to collect a woman’s name, address, phone number and sensitive details about her sexual activity before dispensing the so-called morning-after pill.

The guidelines, put out by the Canadian Pharmacists Association, have drawn concern from women’s health groups, which say the rules are discriminatory and raise privacy issues. . . .

Janet Cooper, senior director of professional affairs for the pharmacists’ association, said the information is necessary to determine whether the pill will be used appropriately and effectively, since it doesn’t work if taken more than three days after intercourse.

She said the information is to be kept in the pharmacy’s computer “so that if she came in a month later for another one, that would mean she probably needs to be advised to get better contraception.”

The medication is OTC in Canada, so pharmacists are the most direct source of information about its use. But the need to ensure informed decision-making has nothing to do with requiring unrequested “advice to get better contraception”. And the informational program is highly intrusive, while storage of the information for lookup on the pharmacy computer is simply creepy. (There is no explanation of how this information will be protected or who will have access to it.)

Health Canada moved the emergency contraceptive levonorgestrel, or Plan B, from being a prescription to a behind-the-counter drug in April, making it available to women of any age. A woman is required to ask the pharmacist for it so she can be counselled about its use.

The pharmacists’ association immediately posted guidelines on its website. They include giving women a screening form to fill out that asks for personal identification, the time when they last had unprotected sex, the number of times they have had unprotected sex since their last menstrual period, and what form of birth control they use. The information should be stored in the pharmacy’s computer, the guidelines state.

“These are highly personal, interrogative questions, and it’s disturbing,” [Anne Rochord] Ford [a drug-safety activist]said. Women taking this pill are already under stress, and “the last thing they need is this kind of interrogation,” she said.

“We are a bit stumped why they have gone to this degree,” she said. “This is just so over the top, unnecessary and unproductive.”

Most pharmacies don’t have a private place to counsel women, so it must be done in public.

It should be up to the woman to ask for advice about taking it, Ford said.

Canada has not been as plagued with right-wing hysteria over sex as has America. It would be sad to see the kind of hostility and intrusiveness that US women face in getting their sexual-health needs met start to take root up north. Let us hope this is just a bad idea, not the beginning of yet another war on women.