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Saturday, August 27, 2005

One step closer to submitting used tampons for government inspection
Posted by Jill | 9:17 AM

Echidne reports on the Bush Administration's decision to delay for another 30 days a decision on selling emergency contraception without a prescription, in a flagrant bow to bluestocking fundie nutballs, who are terrified that making it available will "encourage teen sex". You wonder where these people were in their own lives when their own hormones were rushing. Kids don't need to be encouraged to have sex, and threats of dire consequences has NEVER stopped it.

I was in junior high and high school pre-Roe, back in the days when NO ONE would have thought to prescribe contraception for a teenager, and every year, there were girls who "went to stay with grandma for a while." (And it's always been interesting to me that when John List wanted to cover the tracks for massacring his family in my old home town, he used the same "Grandma's sick" excuse that parents of pregnant girls used to explain THEIR daughters' absence from school.)

Back to Echnidne:

It is fascinating that the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated that the morning-after pill accounts for up to 43% of the drop in abortion rates between 1994 and 2000. I thought that the wingnuts wanted abortions to disappear? But not enough to let women have the morning-after pill?

The traditional excuse is that the wingnuts have decided the pill equals abortion. But:

If a woman already is pregnant, the pills have no effect. They prevent ovulation or fertilization of an egg. They also may prevent the egg from implanting into the uterus, the medical definition of pregnancy, although recent research suggests that's not likely.

It is the last possibility, that of preventing implantation, that the wingnuts consider to be abortion. But it's not likely. Ahem. IT'S NOT LIKELY.

Never mind. This is all about punishing women for carefree sex by making it not-so-carefree. Also punishing rape victims who are too scared to go to a hospital or who go to a hospital that doesn't believe in the morning-after pill for rape victims. And this is all about politics, too. Grim, isn't it?


Yes, the nutballs DO think that fertilization = conception, NOT implantation. Given that up to 30% of fertilized eggs never implant, government adoption of the fertilization standard really DOES open the door to the requirement to submit used tampons to the government for inspections for fertilized eggs, and investigations of menstruating women to make sure that they did nothing to prevent implantation.

And yes, this also means you can kiss your birth control pills and IUDs and Depo-Provera shots goodbye.
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