The morning-after pill was not seen as an alternative to protection -- the pills made you nauseated and ashamed -- but it was a relief to know that they were there, just in case. The alternative was to anxiously wait the weeks until your next period, praying that you weren't pregnant. (Of course, the other alternative was to not have sex at all, but that argument didn't seem to take at my university.)

But Berkeley is a liberal outpost where awareness of emergency contraception is widespread and the pills are easy to obtain. Most American women don't know about emergency contraception at all, let alone how to get it or when to take the pills. For those who do, the process of acquiring it is relatively onerous: You need to visit your doctor, get a prescription and fill it within 72 hours.

The desire to make the morning-after pill easily available to all women has motivated reproductive rights activists and physicians to take action. "Emergency contraception is so time-sensitive, and we want teens and everyone to have increased access in the most convenient manner," says Betsy Cavendish, legal director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL). "Every single hurdle could spell the difference between getting pregnant and not getting pregnant. You want it to be convenient, not to have to make doctor's appointments [that require you to] leave school or your job. The whole process can be quite cumbersome."

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To make it less so, Planned Parenthood of Chicago has launched a service that will dispense prescriptions for the morning-after pill via its Web site to women in Illinois and Georgia. Women merely fill in a form, and a nurse practitioner will call the prescription in to a local pharmacy. (Alternatively, women can get a prescription by telephone from 47 Planned Parenthood clinics, according to the AP story.)

As for the medical community, it has been aware of the existence of emergency contraception since the 1970s. But it wasn't until the early 1990s, when Dr. James Trussell, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, began studying emergency contraception, that doctors truly realized the pills' potential.

"We decided that promoting emergency contraception was the single best way to reduce the incidents of unwanted pregnancy in the U.S., because it involved nothing new -- the technology was already there, it was merely a matter of educating providers and women about it," explains Trussell, who, a decade later, has authored a dozen studies on the subject.

Yet even today, only 10 percent of all doctors have ever even prescribed it. It took nearly 10 years for Trussell and his colleagues to persuade America's cautious medical organizations to not merely publicly endorse the use of emergency contraception, but to promote it. But momentum is picking up: Last December, the American Medical Association issued its first statement of support for making emergency contraception available over the counter.

"It's virtually certain to happen," says Trussell. "The expert medical consensus is that this drug is very safe and effective, instructions are simple, you can't overdose on it, the woman herself diagnoses the condition -- which is unprotected sex -- and it's perfect to go over the counter."

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