One afternoon, before the barstools were nabbed and happy hour banter filled the cozy, brick-walled space, a group of teenagers wandered into Trouble Bar in Louisville, Kentucky.

Oh no, I’m going to have to card them, proprietor Kaitlyn Soligan Owens thought to herself. She and co-owner Nicole Stipp maintain that they run a strictly 21-and-up bar, not a local dive that lets a few college students with fake IDs slide.

But instead of ordering cocktails, the group made a pit stop at the restroom before heading over to the bar to ask Soligan Owens for the “pregnancy stuff” that’s typically out for the community to take. They walked out of Trouble Bar with boxes of free emergency contraception, commonly known as the morning-after pill, sparing them a trip to the pharmacy, where they would have had to fork over $50 and risked being questioned by nosy employees or suffered a dreaded run-in with a gossipy classmate.

“I said, ‘I’m so proud of you for knowing you need emergency contraception, but I’m concerned that you think a bar is where you get that,’” Soligan Owens recalls. “But it was the first time I realized that apparently everyone knows we carry emergency contraception.”

“It was the first time I realized that apparently everyone knows we carry emergency contraception.”

“We want you to be able to go get EC wherever, but feel good about doing it. There’s no shame. If you are in a bar and you might have sex that night, don’t forget your EC,” says Amanda E/J Morrison, Julie’s cofounder and president. “That’s just as empowering a decision as ordering what drinks you want or choosing to go out in the first place.”

It’s unclear exactly how the group of under-21-year-olds found out that emergency contraception was available at Trouble Bar, since it’s not publicized. Either way, the owners are proud of their reputation—why shouldn’t every bar offer a bowl of EC next to the free tampons? Accessibility to safe contraception, particularly in the face of backwards abortion restrictions, means getting free emergency contraception to people who need it the most. But it also means that everyone growing up in the post-Roe era should know that taking EC and proactively keeping it on hand is just as much a part of routine health care as getting a vaccine or an STI screening. “The entire experience is based on wanting to tell a better story for the next generation,” says Morrison.


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“There’s no shame. If you are in a bar and you might have sex that night, don’t forget your EC.”


SOURCE:COSMOPOLITAN