Plan B: Memo to the President (You Won the Last Election)

As readers of this blog will know, the Phantom is fond of the President. 
The Phantom voted for the President.
The Phantom smiles whenever he sees the President on T.V., because, after 8 years of cringing whenever the President of the United States opened his mouth, it has been such a pleasure to hear the official who was elected to our highest office say intelligent things with regularity.
But why, oh why, is this President pandering to the most reactionary, fundamentalist, whacko elements of our populace when it comes the morning after pill?

The Phantom can understand why its opponents so loathe the whole idea of a morning after pill:
1. Here is a product made for a woman who has had unprotected sexual intercourse. We can imagine she might be a respectable, married woman, but we suspect more often she will be an unmarried woman who has had sex, and that offends at least 1/2 of 1% of our population.
2. Levonorgestrel, a progesterone and a component of many birth control pills when given as a big dose may make the endometrium inhospitable to a fertilized egg. So, if you believe a fertilized ovum is a human life looking for a receptive home to put down roots and it finds nothing but a barren wasteland, so it withers and dies, then you have an abortion. 
On the other hand, the prevailing opinion is the pill does not  work  by preventing implantation but works  by preventing ovulation, (at least most of the time) -- in which case no argument can be made Plan B causes abortion, that is wastage of a fertilized egg. It works by preventing the egg from ovulating, and so there is no egg to be found by foraging sperm.
(On the other hand, if it works only by preventing ovulation one would ask how it would prevent pregnancy in a woman who has an ovulated egg in the Fallopian tube or the endometrium, when she has intercourse. It may, like birth control pills also make the cervical mucous thicker and sticky so sperm cannot get past the cervix.)
  The point is, the likelihood is this pill is not likely, most often,  a pill which works after the egg has been found by the sperm, but before. That would make it a contraceptive not an abortifacient. 

Now, enter the FDA, the agency which is comprised of doctors, pharmacists, scientists and is supposed to render decisions about drugs which are concerned with verifying the scientific evidence says the drug in question is A/ Safe and B/ Effective.  The FDA is not supposed to enter into theological or political argument. 
So the FDA says, originally, this drug would be safe and effective for a 13 year old girl to take,  and it should therefore be available on the shelves of pharmacies, to any person who wants to buy it. It should not be held behind the pharmacist counter available only when the pharmacy is open, but should be on the shelf of any grocery store with a pharmacy or of any Walmart or Target, and no ID need be presented to verify age. (Of course a 13 year old girl would not have a driver's licence, so with the ID requirement currently in place, she'd need a birth certificate or a passport.)

Of course, the FDA has not always been able to dodge the politics. The FDA was about to approve over the counter status for birth control pills, but Planned Parenthood, among other organizations resisted it because it argued handing out birth control pills in clinics was the one way to assure women would actually be seen by some health care practitioner, get a Pap smear and a blood pressure check. So the simple issue of safe or not safe got waylaid by social concerns in the case of birth control pills.

Now, it's happening again, this time to the morning after pill.

We can only imagine the arguments:  1/ I don't want my 14 year old daughter having unprotected sex, getting pregnant, getting an sexually transmitted disease, all of this behind my back and thinking, oh, well, I can always go buy Plan B . And she'll be doing this 10 times a month.   2/ I don't want my daughter (or your daughter or any woman) having unprotected sex, or having any sex,  and then buying a cheap abortion without so much as a fare thee well.  3/ I don't care about preventing unwanted pregnancies. I just do not want women having sex period,  and if they get pregnant, well that'll learn 'em. Sex is dirty and foul and it ought to cause suffering.

Mr. President: The people who are going to get steamed about Plan B would never vote for you, will never vote Democratic--you have lost them forever so forget about them. Think of all those people who will be happy about this medical breakthrough. Think about those desperate 14 year old girls.

And think of this: The difference between contraception and abortion is time and development, just as the difference between veal and mutton is puberty.  A drug taken 24 hours after intercourse is destroying the development of a two cell --or maybe a four cell--conceptus, and at that point only the most extreme fundamentalists would call that thing a human life. 

Let us make abortions unnecessary by making effective contraception available, inexpensive and such an easy option even the most clueless 14 year old girl will have the opportunity to save her life from ruin.