The Fight Against Fake Birth Control

With a growing number of “verified” emergency contraceptives being registered in Peru over the past few years, a nonprofit organization became suspicious that some of the birth control being sold in Peruvian pharmacies was not the pill described on the packaging. Fearing that the pills were faulty, the organization contacted researchers in the United States to investigate what exactly was in them. What they found alarmed them: one in four of the emergency contraceptives they sampled wasn’t what it appeared to be. In fact, one wasn’t even birth control at all—it was just a cheap antibiotic being sold as birth control.