Combined emergency contraceptive pills ("morning after
pills") contain two types of hormones, estrogen and progestin,
which are commonly found in daily oral contraceptives. You can use many
brands of daily birth control pills to prevent
pregnancy after sex.

Doctors recommend that you take your first dose of combined emergency
contraceptive pills within 120
hours, followed by a second dose 12 hours later. Each dose contains
at least 100 mcg of estrogen and .50 mg of progestin, so the number
of pills will depend on which daily oral contraceptive you are
using for emergency contraception.
You can use combined pills for emergency contraception even
if your doctor recommends against using oral contraceptives for
your regular birth control (For more details about using these pills,
click here. While you have
a lot of choices of combined pills you can take for emergency contraception,
remember that not every oral contraceptive can be used this way (find
out why here).

Combined emergency contraceptive pills reduce your risk
of pregnancy by about 75%. Don’t worry, this doesn’t
mean that 25 percent of women get pregnant using these morning
after pills. It just means that this type of emergency contraception
prevents 75% of the pregnancies researchers would expect to happen
when a woman doesn’t use birth control, her contraception fails
(like the condom breaks or falls off), or she is made to have sex against her will.
Usually, if 100 women have sex without using birth control one time
during the second or third week of their monthly menstrual cycle,
about 8 of them will get pregnant. But if those same women also use
combined emergency contraceptive pills, only two will get pregnant.
And the sooner you start taking
emergency contraception after sex, the better it works. Even so, you
should know that progestin-only emergency
contraceptive pills are more effective.

About half of women who use combined emergency contraceptive pills
experience nausea and
about one in 5 vomits. If you throw up within an hour after taking
a dose, you may need to take that same dose again. One way to reduce
the chances you’ll get sick to your stomach is to use an over-the-counter
anti-nausea drug an hour before you take emergency contraception.
In the United States, you should look for the long-acting medicine
meclizine, which is sold both as a generic and under the brand names
Dramamine II and Bonine. Keep in mind, fewer women experience nausea
and vomiting after taking progestin-only
emergency contraceptive pills.

To learn which brands of combined
emergency contraception and daily birth control pills can be found
in the United States or any other country, try using our up-to-date
database. Or take a look at this
table for quick information
about the brands of oral contraceptives in the United States that
can be used as morning after
pills. You can also have a health care provider insert a Copper-T
IUD up to five days after sex to prevent
pregnancy.