Posts filed under Abortion

Change You Can Believe In (Vol. III, No. 12): Emergency Contraception.

From the New York Times (December 7, 2011). Boldface mine, for the parts that feel like getting kicked right in the stomach.

WASHINGTON — For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

The contraceptive pill, called Plan B One-Step, has been available without a prescription to women 17 and older, but those 16 and younger have needed a prescription — and they still will because of the decision by the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius. If taken soon after unprotected sex, the pill halves the chances of a pregnancy.

Although Ms. Sebelius had the legal authority to overrule the F.D.A., no health secretary had ever publicly done so, an F.D.A. spokeswoman said… .

— Gardiner Harris, Plan to Widen Availability of Morning-After Pill is Rejected, New York Times (Dec. 7, 2011)

Until now.

Ms. Sebelius’s decision on an emotional issue that touches on parental involvement in birth control for teenage children is likely to have powerful political reverberations. Scientists and politicians have been at odds for years over whether to make Plan B available over the counter. The Bush administration at first rejected over-the-counter availability for women of any age, but ultimately allowed it for women 18 and older. After a federal court order, the Obama administration lowered the age to 17 in 2009.

With Ms. Sebelius’s decision on Wednesday, the Obama administration is taking a more socially conservative stance on Plan B, one closer to that of the Bush administration than to many of its own liberal supporters … .

For Dr. [Margaret] Hamburg [head of the Food and Drug Administration], the studies and experts all agreed that young women would benefit from having easy access to the pill and did not need the intervention of a health care provider. The agency’s scientists, she wrote, determined that the product was safe and effective in adolescent females, that adolescent females understood the product was not for routine use, and that the product would not protect them against sexually transmitted disease.

… Dr. Susan Wood, a former F.D.A. assistant commissioner who resigned in 2005 to protest the Bush administration’s handling of Plan B, said that there were many drugs available over the counter that had not been studied in pre-adolescents and that were far more dangerous to them.

Acetaminophen can be fatal, but it’s available to everyone, Dr. Wood noted. So why are contraceptives singled out every single time when they’re actually far safer than what’s already out there?

… The American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have endorsed over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. Plan B was approved in 1999 as a prescription-only product, and it initially had few sales. In 2003, advocates filed an application for over-the-counter sales.

An expert advisory committee recommended approval, and scientists within the Food and Drug Administration unanimously supported that recommendation. Their rationale was simple: women can decide on their own when they need to take it, the drug is effective and its risks are minimal — particularly compared with pregnancy. But in a highly unusual move, top agency officials rejected the application because, some said later, they feared being fired if they approved it.

The agency delayed reconsideration for years despite promises by top Bush administration officials to do so. Then in 2006, the Bush administration allowed over-the-counter sales to women 18 and older but required a prescription for those 17 and younger. In 2009, the F.D.A. lowered the easy-access age limit by a year after a federal judge ruled that its decision had been driven by politics and not science.

— Gardiner Harris, Plan to Widen Availability of Morning-After Pill is Rejected, New York Times (Dec. 7, 2011)

Progressive Pro-Choice Peace President Barack Hussein Obama would like the Washington Post to know that he didn’t do it. He didn’t do it, but he dug it.

President Obama said Thursday that he supports his administration’s decision to block unrestricted sale of the morning-after pill to people younger than 17, a move that dismayed women’s advocates when it was announced by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Sebelius said Wednesday that she had overruled the Food and Drug Administration, which had decided to make the contraceptive available to people of all ages directly off drugstore and supermarket shelves, without a prescription.

Obama said he did not get involved in the decision to require a prescription for girls 16 and under before it was announced, leaving it up to Sebelius.

But, he said: I will say this. As the father of two daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.

And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old, going to a drug store, should be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, purchase a powerful drug to stop a pregnancy, Obama said. I think most parents would probably feel the same way.

— Rob Stein and Anne E. Kornblut, Obama defends administration’s refusal to relax Plan B restrictions, The Washington Post (Dec. 8, 2011).

Especially parents who are trying to win a political election. I wonder if they bothered to ask an 11-year-old girl, who is afraid of becoming pregnant, how she feels about it?

About 10 percent of girls are physically capable of bearing children by 11.1 years of age. It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age, Sebelius said.

— Rob Stein and Anne E. Kornblut, Obama defends administration’s refusal to relax Plan B restrictions, The Washington Post (Dec. 8, 2011).

Therefore, the state should ensure that the youngest girls of reproductive age are forced to get pregnant.

Back in the New York Times:

Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Obama administration may be trying to assuage Catholic bishops and others angered in recent weeks by a decision requiring that health insurance programs created under the new health reform law offer contraceptives for free.

I think they’re trying to create some political balance, Mr. Ornstein said.

— Gardiner Harris, Plan to Widen Availability of Morning-After Pill is Rejected, New York Times (Dec. 7, 2011)

Yes, a balance. Marvel as President Obama, liberal voters and the Catholic Bishops defy gravity in a spectacular balancing act! Right on top of a terrified 12 year old girl’s body.

This decision is inexcusable. And what makes it even worse is having to watch to the newsmedia calmly discussing the political calculations that went into it, as if what really mattered here had nothing to do with the lives affected by this decision, with the girls who have to live in fear of an unwanted pregnancy because their access to basic medical treatments has been regimented and sacrificed for the sake of a Democratic politician’s political prospects — as if what was really worth discussing was whether that palavering creep and the rest of his administration will be able to effectively exploit this regulatory backstab to increase their chances at holding onto political power for another four years. There are no English words for just how contemptible this shameful display is.

See also:

In which women’s access to abortion becomes public-optional

From GT 2009-08-20: Tonight, in News of the Obvious:

And in breaking news from NARAL Pro-Choice America, it turns out that government provision of healthcare means that women’s healthcare will be allocated through a political process, and when women’s reproductive healthcare is allocated through a political process, women’s reproductive healthcare ends up being subjected to the vicissitudes of political debate over abortion.

NARAL may not draw the conclusion from its report, but the editorial board here at News of the Obvious will: setting aside outright political prohibitions, which aren’t likely to pass in the near future, a broad expansion of political control over women’s healthcare is the single worst thing that could possibly happen towards undermining women’s access to abortion and reproductive medicine.

—GT 2009-08-20: Tonight, in News of the Obvious

The House of Representatives just recently passed an omnibus health insurance bill which includes extensive new government involvement in health insurance and a strong public option of broad-based government-provided health insurance. The explicit purpose of this bill is to expand political control and political funding in the health insurance industry — to expand government’s role and responsibility in directly paying for healthcare and medical procedures, and to shift more of the money coming in to for-profit health insurance companies away from private sources, and towards government funding sources.

So-called Progressive While so-called Progressive organizations on the male Left — groups like MoveOn and SEIU and the AFL-CIO — have been celebrating the passage of the House bill as a great big win. MoveOn.org calls it historic health care reform and headlines their front page Victory!; now they are staging Countdown to Change rallies to thank those representatives who stood with the American people (by this, they mean those that voted for expanding the scope of the American government). In an e-mail circulated to their mailing list, the AFL-CIO called it a truly historic movement and called on supporters to pressure their Senators to pass a similar bill in order to ensure final victory.

Well, wait.

Just one little problem about this Huge Step Forward: turns out that, if it passes the Senate too, it will strip millions of women of access to abortion, by using strings attached to the new government funding to stop both the public option health insurance plans and plans offered by existing insurance companies from covering abortion procedures.

Oops.

From the National Organization for Women:

The House of Representatives has dealt the worst blow to women’s fundamental right to self-determination in order to buy a few votes for reform of the profit-driven health insurance industry. We must protect the rights we fought for in Roe v. Wade. We cannot and will not support a health care bill that strips millions of women of their existing access to abortion.

Birth control and abortion are integral aspects of women’s health care needs. Health care reform should not be a vehicle to obliterate a woman’s fundamental right to choose.

The Stupak Amendment goes far beyond the abusive Hyde Amendment, which has denied federal funding of abortion since 1976. The Stupak Amendment, if incorporated into the final version of health insurance reform legislation, will:

  • Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
  • Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange, administered by private insurance companies, from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
  • Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.

NOW calls on the Senate to pass a health care bill that respects women’s constitutionally protected right to abortion and calls on President Obama to refuse to sign any health care bill that restricts women’s access to affordable, quality reproductive health care.

—Terry O’Neill, National Organization for Women (2009-11-08): NOW Opposes Health Care Bill That Strips Millions of Women of Abortion Access Says Bill Obliterates Women’s Fundamental Right to Choose

Once again, this should come as no surprise. Government health insurance means political allocation for women’s healthcare — for any and every one of the women who is moved over to public options and public-private partnerships on the public health insurance exchanges.

Political allocation of women’s healthcare means that women’s healthcare will be subjected to political debate and sacrificed in the name of political compromises — which, in this country, means being subjected and sacrificed to the Gentleman’s Agreement between anti-choice partisans, on the one hand, and, on the other, the doughface politicos, who just don’t give much of a damn about women’s lives or health or freedom, and are happy to treat them as optional as long as they’ve got a bill to pass or a Democrat to elect.

This healthcare bill, authored by Democrats, pushed by Democrats, and supposedly a key aspect of the male liberal’s agenda for Progressive social change, will almost certainly mean a massive government-sponsored assault on women’s access to abortion. Women’s bodies are not public property; women’s health should not be subject to public controversy or dependent on the approval of the public (which means, in fact, the loudest and most belligerent voices in politics). But as long as government is calling the shots on women’s healthcare, women’s healthcare is always going to be compromised and sacrificed in the name of political agendas. The only way to make sure that women’s healthcare will no longer be treated as public-optional is real radical healthcare reform — not by preserving the government-regimented corporatist status quo, but rather by getting government out of healthcare entirely — by cutting the government strings that always come attached to government money — by getting rid of government subsidy and government regimentation and replacing them with grassroots mutual aid, abortion funds, community-supported free clinics, and other forms of low-cost healthcare free of political control because they are supported by free association and community organizing, rather than taxation and political allocation. That is to say, by taking the funding for women’s healthcare out of the hands of politicians, and putting in the hands of women themselves.

Expanding government control of healthcare funding is anti-choice, anti-woman, and would represent the single biggest assault on women’s access to abortion in the last 30 years.

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Monday Lazy Linking

On being part of the problem

Matt Cockerill at the Young Americans for Liberty blog wants to know why there aren’t more libertarian women. By which he apparently means that he wants to know why more women don’t read his own personal libertarian blog and why more women don’t go to the libertarian political events that he personally goes to. (Which is actually a separate question, although men posting Where’s the women? posts never quite seem to recognize that.)

The first point in Matt’s discussion is to ask whether this might be the result of intractable forces predisposing women to be anti-libertarian. (Along with a link to an LRC article arguing, based purely on anecdote and appeal to conventional wisdom, that women are instinctually anti-libertarian because they are too emotional and mostly incapable of abstract thought.)

The second point in Matt’s discussion is to wish for more women to show up for his Sausage Party because libertarian men are currently being driven insane by the lack of young libertarian women to hit on.

But I do know that a proportional increase in libertarian women would do well to preserve the sanity of libertarian men. As it stands, the young female “itinerary” [sic! —R.G.] is mostly composed of Obama zombies, fully-blown Marxists, and “murder-all-Iranians” type chickenhawks. This undoubtedly needs to change.

The first commenter, Anonymous, adds: Most women/girls are more emotional than logical. The ones who think with their brain and not their heart are libertarians. But at the same time most libertarian women have a hard time being libertarian with ALL issues.

The third commenter, John M., adds: I think many of the libertarian women that read this site would take offense to being labeled as more emotional than logical. A more scientific distinction would be to argue that the ratio exists because men are naturally more skilled at mathematics and science whereas women are more skilled in the disciplines of reading and writing. This gives men an advantage at comprehending and anaylzing the ramifications of policies. But he does want more women in the movement, because he believes (based on the experience of Sarah Palin, who he insults as having little … brain-power or charisma) that having a few women on the ticket (a few women who he believes will need to be politically educated by libertarian men) they will be useful for getting out the vote.

Commenter Jack, in reply to John M.’s mention of a female professor who once chewed [him] up for saying that women are more emotional than logical, adds: LOL. More indoctrination. I hate to hear stories of culturally marxist academia. It would be one thing to politely disagree, but professors these days will eat you up if you try to say that any two people are different than each other in any way. Matt Cockerill comes back around to use this as an opportunity to tell us what he thinks is wrong with the modern women’s movement: The result of the egalitarian, denialist feminist indoctrination of the last few decades has been a generation of guys afraid to act like guys, and women who hate most of us for being fakers.

Matt Cockerill also comes back around to mention that he opposes a woman’s right to abortion, and that he considers this position compatible with the politics of individual liberty.

Sometimes, when women don’t show up for your parties, the best thing to do is not to ask whether there’s something wrong with women that makes them naturally predisposed not to dig the things you think they should dig. Because, dude, sometimes the reason that women don’t want to hang out with you is because there’s something wrong with you. And, specifically, because there’s something wrong with the way that you treat women.

And if you want a good example, why not start with the way you approached your original question?

Incidentally, be sure to read through the comments thread on the original post — not because the bulk of the comments are enlightening or even maginally original, but rather because radical feminist, left-libertarian Drunkenatheist’s commentary on the bulk of the comments is. Props.

(Link thanks to Drunkenatheist [2009-08-28].)

See also:

Tonight, in News of the Obvious

Las Vegas correspondent Walter E. Gunther writes in to the Las Vegas Sun, Politicians mostly put their own needs first.

And in breaking news from NARAL Pro-Choice America, it turns out that government provision of healthcare means that women’s healthcare will be allocated through a political process, and when women’s reproductive healthcare is allocated through a political process, women’s reproductive healthcare ends up being subjected to the vicissitudes of political debate over abortion.

NARAL may not draw the conclusion from its report, but the editorial board here at News of the Obvious will: setting aside outright political prohibitions, which aren’t likely to pass in the near future, a broad expansion of political control over women’s healthcare is the single worst thing that could possibly happen towards undermining women’s access to abortion and reproductive medicine.