The emotional aspect of the morning-after pill I didn’t see coming

“On my way out, carrying the pill in my hand, I started to feel anxiety creeping up on me.”

When you take the morning-after pill, there are a few side effects that are pretty common. Sore breasts, abdominal pain and nausea are all listed as potential impacts of emergency contraception (EC). But I experienced one complexity that I couldn’t have predicted: a sudden, deep questioning of my fertility and the timing of my life.

According to The Royal Women’s Hospital, the morning-after pill can be taken “if you’ve had unprotected sex, or had a condom break” and don’t want to become pregnant. It’s also important to note that emergency contraception can be used after someone is sexually assaulted.

Kickstart your wellness journey over at our Health section.

Emergency contraception should be used “within 72 hours (three days) of having sex”, and is more effective “the sooner you take it”. The Royal Women’s Hospital states that the most common method of EC “consists of either one pill or two pills taken together”. It is crucial to know that taking the morning-after pill isn’t a 100 per cent guarantee that you won’t get pregnant – rather, it prevents about “85 per cent of expected pregnancies”.

Taking EC is a pretty run-of-the-mill thing to do if you’re sexually active. Given, you shouldn’t take it too often but if a condom breaks, slips or is missing entirely, EC is generally a safe and accessible solution for preventing unwanted pregnancy (we are lucky in Australia).

When my boyfriend and I experienced one of these condom-related slips, I felt safe knowing that the next morning, I could go straight to the pharmacy and buy some EC. So that’s what I did. At the chemist, I headed for the prescription counter and asked for it. The pharmacist asked me a few questions. When did I last have sexual intercourse? When was my last period? Was there any chance I was already pregnant?

I filled out a form with some medical and personal information and was handed the pill with some instructions. On my way out, carrying the pill in my hand, I started to feel anxiety creeping up on me. Washing the EC down with the blue Gatorade I’d bought for my hungover boyfriend, I already felt agitated and teary. This feeling endured for a couple of days – I didn’t have any physical ailments but was overrun with emotion and sobbing frequently.

The night after I took EC, I had a dream where I was pregnant – I’d never had one of these before, and knew that the timing was no coincidence. Although I knew that there was no way that I could be pregnant after just 24 hours, I realised that I was feeling some weird kind of guilt after taking the emergency contraception.

I think it’s important for me to acknowledge taking EC is vastly different from having an abortion (I can only imagine how hard that must be to go through), and I’m not at all likening my experience to the physical or emotional effects of terminating a pregnancy. What I did experience was a sudden urge to question the timing of my life.

I found myself wondering what I would do if I did turn out to be pregnant – I had previously thought there was no way I wanted a baby anytime soon. But when I realised how easy it is to have slip-ups or to make mistakes, I think it made me question what I’d actually do if the situation arose.

I’d emotionally recovered for the most part when my period arrived two weeks early. A thought flitted across my mind, if only for a second, that I was having some sort of miscarriage. I didn’t really think I was pregnant, but some heavy bleeding completely out of the blue had me questioning whether the EC hadn’t worked or if something else weird was going on.

Thanks to some great women’s health websites, my sister and I quickly figured out that sometimes the morning-after pill can cause abnormal things to happen with your period. And that’s all it was.

I’ve had some illuminating conversations with some of the women in my life about our experiences with taking emergency contraception and having to contemplate abortion, as well as our thoughts on fertility, timing and societal pressure – all the things that we, as women, go through.

Being a woman at the very beginning of my twenties, I have a whole lot I want to do, see and feel before I even think about having kids. I had a discussion with my friend, in which she told me that she hadn’t thought about any of this either – until she learned about female fertility at uni.

It was then she realised how short the window is before our eggs become ‘geriatric’ (science’s words, not mine). She began to examine when she actually wanted to have kids, versus when she was supposed to.

From the other conversations I’ve had with early-twenties women in my life, it feels like some of us are looking into when we should be settling down and thinking about starting a family. I’ve come to the conclusion that, although I’d love to not think about reproducing until much later in my life, it’s normal to worry.

For more on the morning-after pill, head here.