Consoling news for women! It turns out U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recent decision to keep 17-year-olds from buying over-the-counter emergency contraception doesn't affect young women much. As it turns out, pharmacists are lying to women about its availability anyway:

Research released Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association — or JAMA — suggests that many women, who are legally able to buy emergency contraception, are being told by pharmacies that they aren’t old enough to buy it without a prescription or that the drug isn’t available at all.

Female research assistants posing as 17-year-olds called every commercial pharmacy in Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon. They found that 23.7 percent of pharmacies in low-income neighborhoods claimed that women could not obtain the morning-after pill under any circumstances regardless of age. This was only true of 14.6 percent of pharmacies in affluent neighborhoods.

Of the low-income pharmacies where the drug was not “hidden,” half gave the wrong age requirements for purchasing it, almost always indicating that callers would have to be older than legally necessary. In more affluent neighborhoods, pharmacies gave the correct age requirements 62.8 percent of the time.

Needless to say, this is all very illegal.