Researchers have claimed that women having advance access to emergency contraception has no effect on reduction of pregnancy rates among teens.

Consisting of a total of 11 trials, the research involved collection of data of 7,695 women from China, United States, Sweden and India. The results showed that women who use morning-after pill in advance had a similar pregnancy rate as women who did not receive the emergency contraception in advance.

The research also found that females who took morning-after pills in advance were no more likely to have unprotected sex, contract Sexually Transmitted Diseases, or to use some other contraceptive method. However, women with advance access to the emergency pill did take the medication 13 hours sooner after sex than the ones who did not have an advance access, and the same lot was more likely to use emergency contraception.

The review puts a real question mark over the British government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, through which it promotes emergency contraception among teen girls.

Chelsea Polis, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who also lead the research, says, “Our review suggests that strategies for advance provision of emergency contraception which have been tested to date do not appear to reduce unintended pregnancy at the population level”.

The details of the research have been published in The Cochrane Library Review.