An emergency contraceptive should not be treated as a threat to morality. These are health products that give women and girls something fundamental: the ability to decide whether, when and how often to become pregnant. Yet around the world, access to contraception is increasingly being caught in political and ideological battles over reproductive rights.
We are seeing the consequences in different forms. In 2025, the United States, millions of dollars' worth of contraceptive commodities purchased for family planning programmes were left in storage rather than distributed to women and girls who needed them. The situation became so wasteful that contraceptives worth millions of dollars faced expiry and possible destruction while organisations were reportedly willing to facilitate their distribution.
Here in Kenya, the problem takes another form. The Pharmacy and Poisons Board has warned the public about falsified Postinor-2(P2), in the market. The regulator identified a fake batch, T34197R, carrying deceptive information about its manufacturer and packaging. The warning is not simply about counterfeit medicine rather what happens when a woman seeks to prevent an unintended pregnancy and cannot trust that the medicine available to her is genuine.
These two situations may look different. One involves contraceptives being withheld; the other involves falsified contraceptives entering a health system. But they point to the same uncomfortable truth: when reproductive healthcare is disrupted, women and girls bear the consequences.
Those consequences are not abstract. For a young woman who is not ready to become a mother, an unintended pregnancy can mean leaving school, losing employment, being pushed deeper into poverty, facing violence or dependence, or having to abandon plans for her future. For a woman already raising children, another unintended pregnancy can place additional economic and emotional pressure on a household. For a survivor of sexual violence, being denied the ability to prevent a pregnancy can compound an already devastating violation. And for women who have no safe options left, an unintended pregnancy can push them towards unsafe abortion.
This is why contraception must be understood as more than a commodity. It is part of reproductive autonomy. It is part of healthcare. And it is part of the right to live with dignity. Over the years, much of the public debate around reproductive health focuses on abortion, but we sometimes miss the connection between abortion and contraception. If we genuinely want fewer unintended pregnancies and fewer abortions, then access to accurate information, comprehensive sexuality education and a reliable range of contraceptive options should be among our starting points. Instead, we are increasingly seeing contraception itself questioned, restricted, politicised or undermined.
The reality of the matter is that a woman does not become less worthy of dignity because she wants to prevent a pregnancy nor does a girl become immoral because she wants information about her body. And providing young people with accurate sexuality education does not encourage irresponsible behaviour. It gives them the knowledge to make informed decisions and protect themselves. The answer to unintended pregnancy cannot be to make prevention harder. Yet that is effectively what happens when contraceptives are unavailable, unaffordable, unsafe, deliberately withheld or surrounded by misinformation.
The fake P2 alert in Kenya is particularly worrying because emergency contraception is often sought when someone is already anxious about the possibility of an unintended pregnancy. If the product is counterfeit, the person may believe they have taken steps to prevent pregnancy when they have not. That is not merely a pharmaceutical problem, it is a reproductive injustice and women should not have to pay for political battles
We should be asking: Who is paying the price for this policy? Who loses when this medicine is unavailable? Whose future becomes harder because someone else decided that reproductive healthcare was politically inconvenient? What happens when a government spends public money purchasing essential contraceptives and then allows them to expire?
The answer is painfully familiar: women pay through unintended pregnancies, disrupted education and livelihoods, unsafe abortion, maternal health complications and sometimes, they pay with their lives. This is why reproductive justice cannot simply mean defending the right to abortion. It must also mean defending the conditions that allow people to prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place. That means reliable contraceptive supplies, quality-assured medicines, access to comprehensive sexuality education, confidential, youth-friendly services, access to accurate information, protecting health workers from intimidation, and ensuring that poverty, geography, age or disability do not determine who gets to exercise reproductive autonomy. It is about ensuring that no woman or girl is forced into motherhood simply because the systems around her denied her the information, medicine, choices or freedom she needed to decide for herself.