Good news (?) for 17 year old girls who find themselves in need of the "morning after" pill--you can now get it without a prescription. The NYT headline was "FDA eases access to morning after pill " but the FDA itself reported a court ruling as the reason why they were "easing" access to the pill. This pill has been pretty contentious in religious circles so I doubt we've heard the last of it. Emergency contraception has been in the news since the 1980 discovery of RU-486.

Oral contraceptives better known as the pill have been linked with lupus according to a study published April 15. Researchers are reporting a 2.5-fold increase in lupus within three months of starting acontraceptive. The effect was limited to older generations of contraceptive pills; today's third generation pills were not related to lupus risk. Reuters report here

I found myself in the pathology department tonight and Dr. K. was there.  He is an 80-plus year old sage.  There's no other way to describe him.  So I told him about the recent paper I profiled below where birth control pill users with a long clot lysis time are more prone to clots.