A new study has unearthed something in the world of pharmacy more depressing than filled pediatric cancer-fighting prescriptions that never get picked up: it appears that across the country, pill-dispensing professionals are giving teenage girls misinformation about the morning after pill's legality and availability. But when doctors call the same pharmacists with questions, suddenly everyone at the pharmacy's got their facts straight. It doesn't take a professional mathlete to put two and two together here: pharmacists are routinely lying to teenage girls to keep them from emergency contraception. Stupidest professional moralizing ever?

According to current federal guidelines, girls age 17 and up are legally able to acquire the pill sans prescription at a pharmacy, and girls 17 and under are able to get it with a doctor's prescription. But researchers in an undercover study, conducted by the Boston Medical Center/Boston University School of Medicine and published in the journal Pediatrics, found that when girls 17 and under called their local apothecary for information about Plan B, they're often told that the pill is not legally available to them, or they're given incorrect information about whether or not they need a prescription. According to msnbc, the study went a little something like this,

All callers asked questions from a script. The first question was whether the pharmacy had the medication in stock — 80 percent of the 943 pharmacies said they did. Next, the researcher posing as a teen asked if she could get the drug, while the researcher posing as the doctor of a 17-year-old patient asked if the patient could get the medication.There was a huge disparity between the answers given to the teens and those offered to the physicians, with 19 percent of the 17-year-olds being told that they couldn't get it under any circumstances, compared with only 3 percent of the physicians.

In addition, "teens" who called the pharmacies asked the people they spoke with if they knew what the age restrictions on the morning after pill were, but were given incorrect answers 43 percent of the time.