Last winter, I was sitting in the University Health Center, reading the latest Allure magazine and minding my own business, when a young-looking girl approached me and asked if I knew where the women’s clinic was. I directed her to the second floor and thought we were finished, but she had one more question: Did I know if they had the morning-after pill?

I won’t lie, I balked a little, and for a couple of reasons. First, of course the health center has the morning-after pill. (Doesn’t everyone know that? Apparently not.) Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I had no idea who this girl was, but she just provided me with some particularly personal information as casually as if she were asking how to find the elevator. I replied, she scuttled upstairs, the encounter ended. Whoa.

That story is telling: Emergency contraception is more popular now than ever before, and not just on college campuses. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey reported in 2003 that 68 percent of female participants had heard of EC, up from 41 percent in a similar study done in 1997. What’s more, 6 percent of women surveyed had actually used it, versus only 1 percent in the previous survey.

Following suit with its ever-increasing use is a heightened comfort with the concept. While most of us will have trouble denying that a stigma is still there, rising sales demonstrate that women and adolescent girls are feeling less and less inhibited to call on EC when it’s needed.

Now, with the FDA’s approval, Barr Pharmaceuticals plans to sell Plan B without a prescription in pharmacies all over the country by the end of 2006. With EC so easily accessible, women need to be more cognizant than ever of exactly what Plan B is.

The central controversy around the issue is whether the drug is appropriately named. First off, its informal name, the “morning-after pill,” is in itself a misnomer – you can take the pill up to 72 hours after intercourse. Reports of how much it reduces risk of pregnancy vary. Plan B’s website says 89 percent, but other sources on Plan B cite only 75 percent, and that’s only if taken within the first 24 hours.

Also, there are actually two pills: The first should be taken within 72 hours of having sex, and the second 12 hours after that.

So what about the more proper term, “emergency contraception”? The official Plan B website (http://www.planb.ca) boasts an animation of sperm swimming toward an egg, only to be thwarted by the heroic Plan B pill before reaching their target. Cute? Sure. Accurate? Not totally.

The word “contraception” literally implies prevention of conception, that is, stopping it before it happens. Plan B can definitely do that: It stops ovulation all together and can prevent sperm from fertilizing an already ovulating egg.

Here’s where it gets fuzzy: If the sperm’s already reached the egg, Plan B will also eject a fertilized embryo before it’s implanted (thus why there’s a short window wherein it’s effective). Now we’re into that gray area where there’s debate over whether what’s being flushed out is a meaningless cell or a unique human life. So far, no one knows what the consequences of taking EC after implantation are on the health of the fetus.

Roughly three million unwanted pregnancies happen in the United States annually, and many believe that selling Plan B over the counter has a solid chance of decreasing that number. Interestingly, though, studies such as that done by Gold in 2004 have shown that increasing EC availability doesn’t increase its use. On the plus side, that means no one is replacing condoms with EC, which could lead to spread of STDs. On the down side, that also means it might not prevent as many pregnancies as people are hoping.

Before college students like ourselves rush to get our prescription-free Plan B pills, we need to understand exactly what we’re getting into. A surprising 33.1 percent of national college health centers don’t even prescribe EC to students, mostly due to moral concerns.

Advertisements and product names can be misleading, and campuses such as this one need to hold seminars, print information packets, and do anything else necessary to inform students of uses, risks, and what’s at stake.

Laura Caputo is a physiology and neurobiology major. She can be reached at elsie@umd.edu.