by Karen on March 25, 2009
Here’s some good news via Reuters.
A U.S. court on Monday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider its decisions on the sale of the Plan B emergency contraceptive and ordered its producer to make the pills available to 17-year-olds without a prescription.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in a 52-page ruling, said its order to make Plan B available to 17-year-olds under the same conditions it is currently available to older women must be complied with within 30 days.
As it stands, Plan B is currently available without a prescription with identification.
by Karen on February 24, 2009
Public funding of family planning services prevents around 1.9 million unintended pregnancies, 860K unintended births, 810K abortions and 270K miscarriages each year, saving the United States billions of dollars in medical expenses (source).
Thus it makes sense that, no matter which side of the abortion debate we fall on as individuals, people are provided the services they need to prevent unintended pregnancies. Unless you’re a leader of the Baby Protector Brigade that always screaming about dead babies and evil doctors.
Then you admit that it isn’t about the babies at all, but about straight people getting away with screwing each other without a license:
“It’s another Planned Parenthood bailout,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council. “It covers their overhead.”
He also expressed concern about the concept of public funding of contraception for unmarried people.
“The issue is whether taxpayers should fund, and thereby encourage, behaviour that’s risky and morally questionable,” he said.
And here’s what the FRC says about abortion:
Few things touch on the sanctity of human life more than the practice of abortion. A pregnancy should not simply be “terminated,” as if it were something impersonal and problematic and it cannot be without physical and emotional consequences. A child in the womb is a distinct, developing, wholly human being, and each time a mother decides or a father pressures to end such a life it is a profound tragedy. Abortion harms the mother as well, and deprives society of the gifts of the unborn.
What do these people have to do to get people to realize that they actually hate children about as much as they hate women? Roast a single pregnant woman alive?
by Karen on December 3, 2008
What other conclusion can one draw but that from the latest blathering of the anti-woman Christian Medical Association whose spokesman recently stated that Plan B causes abortions?
Proponents, including the Christian Medical Assn. and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, say the rule is not limited to abortion. It will protect doctors who do not wish to prescribe birth control or to provide artificial insemination, said Dr. David Stevens, president of CMA.
“The real battle line is the morning-after pill,” he said. “This prevents the embryo from implanting. This involves moral complicity. Doctors should not be required to dispense a medication they have a moral objection to.”
The bolded part is a fucking lie. Plan B (aka: morning after pill) does no such thing:
Here’s how the morning-after pill works. Human conception rarely occurs immediately after intercourse. Instead, it occurs as long as several days later, after ovulation. During the time between intercourse and conception, sperm continue to travel through the fallopian tube until the egg appears. So taking emergency birth control the “morning after” isn’t too late to prevent pregnancy.
The active ingredients in morning-after pills are similar to those in birth control pills, except in higher doses. Some morning-after pills contain only one hormone, levonorgestrel (Plan B), and others contain two, progestin and estrogen. Progestin prevents the sperm from reaching the egg and keeps a fertilized egg from attaching to the wall of the uterus (implantation). Estrogen stops the ovaries from releasing eggs (ovulation) that can be fertilized by sperm.
Plan B stops the ovaries from releasing an egg. A woman who takes Plan B is no more inducing an abortion than a woman with LPD (a failure of the uterus to be fully prepared for implantation of a fertilized egg) is inducing an abortion. These doctors ought to be ashamed of themselves.