Gynopedia needs your support! Please consider contributing content, translating a page, or making a donation today. With your support, we can sustain and expand the website. Gynopedia has no corporate sponsors or advertisers. Your support is crucial and deeply appreciated.
Translations:Mumbai/7/en
In India, contraceptives are fully legal. Oral contraceptives or condoms can be purchased at pharmacies, large stores or online. However, many women report feeling uncomfortable and harshly judged when buying contraceptives at pharmacies. For these reasons, they tend to visit pharmacies outside their neighborhoods or only pharmacies that have very few customers in line. Others avoid pharmacies entirely and buy online. Check out this Quora thread for some perspectives on buying contraceptives in India for details. As someone wrote, "I have bought contraceptives from pharmacies in India but I make sure there are very few customers at the counter. It is definitely an intimidating experience. I am not embarrassed, but always worried about what if someone I know is there at the shop as well. But I can never ask the salesperson for choices. Sometimes, I write it down on a piece of paper and pass it on. If the salesperson is understanding, the contraceptive gets wrapped in a brown paper bag and I just pay for it without even checking the contents." Another user wrote, "Albeit the degree of judgment varies. Even if this female is a middle aged woman, looks married maybe, there is no narrow escape. But if this female looked like a normal college going girl, she would now be branded as a next door harlot." [1]