How delighted I was to hear that the morning-after pill will now be available across Canada without intervention of doctor’s no-appointments-until-July office, doctor herself and her scrawled prescription. Because at that point, you see, it is no longer a morning-after pill, but a long-after-the-abortion-itself pill, and what’s the point of that?

It all depends on how young and easily panicked you are. Only teenaged girls have those whispered conferences at bacon-and-egg restaurants the following morning where the phrases “If it didn’t actually go IN” and “Does it work the morning after the morning after?” are bandied about with some urgency.

The answer is to take no chances.

There was a time when women had to race home, boil in a hot bath while drinking gin (but your brain had already dried to a gin crisp from the night’s drinking that led to the faulty condom incident) or jump up and down a lot.

Heat, gin and leaping did nothing to delay the inevitable meeting of sperm and egg and the grim couple’s knitting itself to the wall of your womb.

Those times are over.

You can go to your local pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for the “morning-after pill,” which is the chatty name for levornorgestrel. If it is gulped within 72 hours, the uterine wall turns its back on anything that wants to make a home there.

And if it’s too late, then you go to an abortion clinic, which you can find on-line, or to a doctor.

Distinguished feminist and human-rights lawyer Marilou McPhedran, whom I admire immensely and not just because she has this marvellous talent for making grumpy old men positively choleric, sat on my celebratory cupcake a bit. She told me that teenagers will still have to ask pharmacists for the drug. It isn’t really over-the-counter. And in small towns where pharmacists know you — where you are still in the shamed state of buying your deodorant and tampons in a crouching pose and a head scarf, or where pharmacists play bossy-boots — teenagers are in trouble.

Pharmacists have always puzzled me. At university, I remember them studying terribly hard and yet it seemed they were training for jobs that did not call for leeway. The doctor wrote what she wanted you to do and you did it.

Then came the watershed when the provinces began to force pharmacists to post their fees for filling prescriptions. Here’s your Zantac (now non-prescription), the pharmacist would say. And you’d say, “$9.99? That was $3 a word, lady.”

Suddenly, pharmacists couldn’t just quietly dispense pills and mix ointments. They had to be seen to be justifying their existence, which seemed to me to be terribly unfair to patient and highly trained people increasingly stuck working for huge pharmacy chains. They had to be seen to be doing something, so you also ended up with a printout listing every medicine you’d ever bought. You life flashed before your eyes. What was that “-omycin” for in 1995? Did I have dengue?

Now pharmacists also have to fear Big Pharma, which would prefer that every drug was non-prescription so people could buy it at Costco in big plastic Mason jars. Drug plans cover only prescription drugs; they must be pressuring governments as well.

Now Quebec is saving medicare money by allowing school nurses to hand out doctors’ prescriptions for birth-control pills. Will they soon be dispensing them?

Pharmacists may feel threatened, and that’s when the nutters come out. The so-called “ethical” pharmacists who don’t like the morning-after pill because it offends their ‘beliefs’ will start making threats, which is annoying, as it implies that pharmacists who give you the drug you’re entitled to ask for are somehow not ethical. They’re wastrels, really, moral sluggards using their training in curing the patient’s body without judging her behaviour.

What dreadful people these self-named ethicists are, “with a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart,” as Tennyson put it. We need levonorgestrel to make the uterine wall a K2 without footholds, and we shall have it, Preacher Pharmacist.

When “ethical” pharmacists pop up, most recently in British Columbia when it made the morning-after pill into a no-big-deal pill, I shudder. They’re against anything to do with sex, which means that really they don’t want to follow doctor’s orders if you want birth control, post-sex birth control, sulfa drugs for post-sex itching, drugs to calm you in case the guy doesn’t call . . . When you really consider it, all drugs seem to be sex-related in some way.

If there’s no one waiting for a prescription, I presume these pharmacists station themselves by the Canesten (once a prescription drug) shelf, with all those drugs for yeast infections and glare at people who are walking funny.

It’s dangerous to give pharmacists a moral club with which to beat hopeful pharmaceutical buyers on a Sunday morning.

We used to have fire-and-brimstone evangelists for that, but they’re dead now. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace, wrote Marvell, and he died in 1678, so he knows. He hasn’t slept with his coy mistress for 327 years.

On the other hand, perhaps we do need someone to tell us that sex is wrong. Otherwise, the thrill is gone.

The last thing an 18-year-old girl wants to think is that it’s good for you, even if you are still floating a foot off the sidewalk over that boy’s kiss and the smell of his skin just behind his ear and you won’t wash your sheets ever, you, like, absolutely swear.

Everything I do, I do it for you, beautiful boyfriend, and if that includes shouting at some priss-faced fundamentalist pill-counter on a mission to stamp out The Sexing, then so be it.