ast forward, and the morning after pill is (finally) free in the UK. Cue quietly victorious high-fives to all women everywhere. Emergency contraception is no longer a clandestine transaction, a blush-inducing errand, or a line-item in teenage panic budgets – it’s healthcare, plain and simple. Women can access it without cash, secrecy, or side-eye.

The mechanics are banal but brilliant: over-the-counter in pharmacies, discreetly delivered online if you prefer. Ordinary in execution, extraordinary in implication: autonomy, normalised, and financially unshackled.

And there’s a certain poetry to that liberation. For decades, the pill has been swaddled in whispers, shame, and moral gymnastics. Making it free is a quiet feminist coup – a statement that women’s health belongs to women, not gatekeepers.

Empowerment is often grand, sometimes subtle, always revolutionary. This is empowerment in miniature: reclaiming control over your body, declaring “I decide, I plan, I pivot,” and navigating your own “oops” moments with neither blush nor apology.

So here’s to the morning after pill finally being free: to fewer furtive Boots pilgrimages, fewer whispered requests, and a lot more self-determination served in foil packets. Sometimes revolution arrives with legislation; sometimes it arrives in a tiny, slightly magical tablet handed over the counter, no questions asked.