The ACLU is demanding that Rite Aid stop allegedly discriminating against men when selling emergency contraception after the pharmacy refused to sell Plan B to a New Jersey man.

Even though FDA guidelines approved over-the-counter sales of Plan B to anyone 17 or older, Andrew Andrade said staff at the Jersey City Rite Aid would not sell it to him because Andrade is a man:

“I was thinking if this guy doesn’t sell me this pill then I’m going to have a bigger problem than I already have,” said Andrade.

Andrade says he desperately needed emergency contraception and his girlfriend couldn’t pick it up because she was at work. [...]

“I was a little upset. I said let me speak to the manager. Maybe the manager knows a little bit more about this. They introduced me to the pharmacy manager and he said I cannot sell the pill to you because I was a male,” he said.

Andrade eventually bought the morning-after pill at another pharmacy down the street, and he alerted the ACLU of New Jersey about Rite Aid’s refusal. The state ACLU sent a letter to Rite Aid’s corporate headquarters asking it to “instruct its employees on the law, provide the ACLU with a copy of its guidelines, and apologize to Andrade.”

Rite Aid spokeswoman Ashley Flower said the company’s policy is to provide emergency contraception to any man or woman who asks for it as long as they have a valid ID showing they’re at least 17.

But this is not the first time a pharmacy has refused to sell emergency contraception to a man. A CVS in Texas refused to sell to a man in January and suggested he was a rapist for needing it. Pharmacists at Walgreens have also refused to sell to men, most recently in Georgia and Alabama. And after pharmacists had failed to fill birth control prescriptions and requests the morning-after pill, Walmart instituted a storewide policy requiring pharmacies to provide these medications.

A bill that bans sex-selective abortions — the practice of aborting a fetus based on gender discrimination — failed in the House on Thursday. The measure, known as the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act or PRENDA would have required a doctor to deny abortions to patients who they suspected of engaging in gender discrimination and and further eroded women’s access to abortion services.

As a result, most Democrats voted against the effort, creating an opening for Republicans to claim that lawmakers who have spent months accusing them of waging a war on women, are themselves engaged in a war against little girls. As Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), the bill’s sponsor, and his conservative allies put it:

[Franks] characterized the the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) as a bill necessary to prevent ”the ultimate violence against women,” a nod to the recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act in the House. [...]

Franks drew parallels between sex-selection abortion in the United States and the forced abortions in China and India. Rep. Chris Smith (R-CT), who was one of several Republicans at Thursday’s briefing, called sex-selection abortion on females, “the real war on women,” a reaction to women’s groups and Democrats’ accusations that Republicans have declared a “war on women.” Smith also deemed sex-selection abortion as “population control.”

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly 92 percent of all abortions take place before the gender of the fetus can be identified and under the bill, “only 1.5 percent of pregnancy terminations would occur at a time when sex selection was even possible,” while doctors would have had to become detectives in order to sniff out the “true” motives of their patients.

The measure placed additional burdens on Asian American women, who come from communities that have culturally valued boys more than girls. But rather than reducing instances of sex discrimination that lead to a preference for boys, the bill only perpetuated stereotypes about sex selection and did nothing to expand equality for women in the law. “If Representative Franks wants to be a friend to the Asian American women’s community, we would welcome him to partner with us on any number of initiatives we’ve taken that really lift up the status of women and girls in our community,” Miriam W. Yeung, Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum told ThinkProgress, noting that none of these sponsors have supported PRENDA backed VAWA, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, or Health Equity and Accountability Act.

Indeed, Franks’ assumptions — he claimed that “sex selection is demonstrably increasing here in the United States, especially but not exclusively in the Asian immigrant community”– already seem premised on the idea that Asian American women are somehow victims instead of autonomous, thinking people who make decisions about their own reproductive health. And that perception fits well with the GOP’s anti-women voting record.