Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post (conservative) raises an interesting point about Plan B:
Question 1: Do you think that women should have access to Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, to be used at their own discretion? Yes!
Question 2: Do you think that girls as young as 11 or 12 should be able to buy the morning-after pill without any adult supervision? Didn’t think so.
Question 3: If you answered yes to Question 2, are you a parent? Didn’t think so.
And like she says, “they lost me at the word ‘women’”.
The blurring of lines between “girl” and “woman” is part of erasing the differences between “responsible adult” and “doesn’t-know-better” child. It’s an abdication of responsibility and a loss of innocence.
Another conservative, Jillian Kay Melchoir, makes the argument that Plan B is “a conservative reform that young women can get behind — and it would reduce abortion”. She cites the fact that the prescription requirement to get Plan B as thus: “before a woman can get her prescription, she is pressured or outright required to submit to a pelvic examination, a Pap test, a breast exam, an STD screening, and sometimes even a cervical-cancer vaccination.” And of course, all of this “drives up the user’s costs”.
This call for deregulation of the birth control industry is not a call in the dark, either.
Republican Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal shows how disingenuous the current system is:
So at present we have an odd situation. Thanks to President Obama and the pro-choice lobby, women can buy the morning-after pill over the counter without a prescription, but women cannot buy oral contraceptives over the counter unless they have a prescription.
He advocates a deregulation of the industry, allowing oral contraceptives to be sold OTC. He’s not only Republican, but staunchly Catholic as well. After all, Jindal asserts:
Contraception is a personal matter—the government shouldn’t be in the business of banning it or requiring a woman’s employer to keep tabs on her use of it. If an insurance company or those purchasing insurance want to cover birth control, they should be free to do so. If a consumer wants to buy birth control on her own, she should be free to do so.
That’s the crux of the freedom argument: if you’re an adult, you should be able to buy a medication without a doctor’s visit or prescription, especially when a more severe one is available without one. It would be like having Tylenol prescription-only but Vicodin OTC.
So then we return back to the lowering-abortion idea, with a survey from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute:
Forty-six percent of respondents didn’t use any form of contraception at all in the month they became pregnant. Perhaps they didn’t use the pill because it would have required an expensive visit to the doctor — but if that’s the problem, it’s awfully difficult to explain why they didn’t use condoms either.
True. And even OTC, the pill would be more expensive than condoms, which you can get at the dollar store these days.
Which means that OTC birth control helps the following group:
The potential improvement here is in situations where people (A) would rather have unprotected sex than use a condom; (B) would rather have unprotected sex than take a pill every day if that pill requires a doctor’s visit; and yet (C) would rather take a pill every day than have unprotected sex if that pill is sold over the counter.
So the numbers on that would be interesting to see.
Here’s where I judge all of this, now that these conservatives have weighed in:
It bothers the hell out of me that to obtain Vigamox, an anti-bacterial eyedrop that’s essential during allergy season and far better for your eyes than Visine-A (a steroid that makes eye redness worse by overdilating optic blood vessels), or even a pair of contacts when I run out, I have to go and obtain a prescription from an optometrist. This is an expensive hassle of a process, and not even Walmart can sell me either of these without said prescription—it’s literally illegal.
Yet birth control, or the morning-after pill, which have far deeper side-effects than contacts or eyedrops, are or can be available over the counter.
It’s a disingenuousness that I don’t appreciate, one that affects men and women equally, and goes to show that the healthcare industry is less about “health” and more about “industry”. Fix that shit, then let’s worry about birth control and morning after pills. Those are just a symptom of the problem.
