Representations and uses of emergency contraception in West Africa. A social anthropological reading of a northern medicinal product

Since the early 2000s a new form of progesterone based emergency contraception with no side effects has been on the African market, aimed at reducing contraceptive failure rates and the mortality associated with the practice of unsafe abortion. Studies of emergency contraception (EC) carried out in West Africa have only examined opinions and knowledge about EC. We hypothesized that representations and uses of this method takes place at the intersection of two dimensions: (i) a “Northern” pharmaceutical norm, and (ii) local understandings of the timing of conception. To test this hypothesis we used a discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews with 149 women and 77 with men aged between 18 and 40, of varying marital, social and professional status, resident in Dakar, Ouagadougou and Accra. The interviews were conducted in 2005–2007. EC is overwhelmingly perceived as a Northern medical treatment which encourages greater sexual freedom for women. Many respondents, both male and female, believe that EC is a “chemical” product that may cause sterility, and there is severe questioning of its supposed abortifacient character. EC is being used as recommended by the medical profession – in an occasional manner and in cases of urgent need; but it is also being used, like other post-coital methods which women have long employed, in a programmed and repeated manner. On the one hand the social issue raised by EC, namely the weakening of control by men of the sexuality and fertility of women, may be an obstacle to its diffusion. On the other hand, it may in the end be viewed as simply another post-coital method, whose use is framed by the prevailing systems of temporal representations in the three countries concerned in the study.