The morning-after pill is coming to a convenience store near you

Convenience stores are aptly named. They’re stocked with essentials people need at all hours of the day or night, everything from a quart of milk to a package of condoms. But they haven’t stocked contraception for women.

That’s slowly and steadily changing as an Oakland, California-based company, Cadence, has spent the last year stocking highway gas stations, corner delis and 24-hour convenience stores with its own emergency contraception brand called “Morning After Pill,” which prevents pregnancy by delaying ovulation if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex or a birth control mishap.

The first morning-after pills, a single dose of levonorgestrel, hit convenience store shelves in Texas in March 2024. Since then, according to company executives, the pills are in some 11,000 locations in 48 states. South Dakota and Hawaii are the last holdouts. A zip code search found the product everywhere from an E-Z Mart in San Antonio to a deli in Walla Walla, Washington.

Kate Voyten, the company’s senior vice president of commercial operations, said that Cadence, which is also seeking Food and Drug Administration approval for its over-the-counter regular birth control pill, is trying to make it easier for women to control their sexual health.

“Our original goal was to transform contraception,” she said. “Get it everywhere there is a condom.”

About one-third of all prophylactics for men are sold at convenience stores, she noted, and yet the stores “have nothing for females” except tampons and pregnancy tests.

Over-the-counter emergency contraception is a safe and effective synthetic hormone that’s meant to be used when a condom breaks, a regular birth control pill is missed, or no birth control is used. It works by inhibiting or delaying ovulation and doesn’t end an existing pregnancy or harm a fertilized egg that is already implanted in the uterus, according to the FDA. And it doesn’t affect future fertility. Some patients may experience a later or earlier menstrual period and short-term spotting, headache, nausea, and fatigue.

Availability in stores such as 7-Eleven and Circle K comes even as legislators in some Republican-led states have indicated they want a new level of scrutiny for contraception. It’s been nearly three years since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion and that decision — handed down by the court’s conservative majority — led to many Republican states, including Texas and Tennessee, to criminalize abortion.

The fallout from state abortion bans cut off some women’s access to contraception, since many abortion providers that were forced to close also provided birth control.

In particular, hormonal birth control, which includes emergency contraception, has been under increasing attack from the religious right.

A major legal victory by a conservative Christian legal group in Texas restricted minors’ access to birth control in that state, and a Trump administration order freezing $65 million in family planning funds has threatened contraceptive access from Mississippi to California.

While the Catholic Church has long opposed all forms of artificial birth control, leading anti-abortion groups such as Students for Life of America have ramped up their campaigns targeting emergency contraception, intrauterine devices, shots, implants, patches and birth control pills. The groups falsely claim that these methods are “abortifacients” that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus.

In some states, such as South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, abortion is illegal as soon as an egg is fertilized in the fallopian tube, even before the zygote travels to the uterus and implants.