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Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Kristof pulls no punches
Posted by Jill | 7:34 AM
As I've written before, Nicholas Kristof may be the most maddening columnist at the New York Times. Just as you think he's joined the ranks of establishment media morons, he takes up the cause of Darfur. Or he calls the anti-abortion movement on their hypocrisy in regard to contraception:

The best way to reduce the number of abortions, in turn, would be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Every year, Americans have three million unplanned pregnancies, leading to 1.3 million abortions.

So it should be a no-brainer that we increase access to contraception, and in particular make the "morning after" pill available over the counter. That would be the single simplest step to reduce the U.S. abortion rate, while also helping hundreds of thousands of women avert unwanted pregnancies.

Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, normally prevents pregnancy when taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex — although it is most effective when taken within 24 hours. It is now available in most of the U.S. only by prescription, but the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have both endorsed it for over-the-counter use.

President Bush's Food and Drug Administration has blocked that, apparently fearing that better contraception will encourage promiscuity. But unless the libidophobes in the administration mandate chastity belts, their opposition to Plan B amounts to a pro-abortion policy.

One study, now a bit dated, found that if emergency contraceptives were widely available in the U.S., there would be 800,000 fewer abortions each year. And even though they are generally available only by prescription, emergency contraceptives averted 51,000 abortions in 2000, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

That's one of the paradoxes in the abortion debate: The White House frequently backs precisely the policies that cause America to have one of the highest abortion rates in the West. Compared with other countries, the U.S. lags in sex education and in availability of contraception — financing for contraception under the Title X program has declined 59 percent in constant dollars since 1980 — so we have higher unintended pregnancy rates and abortion rates.

[snip]

One thought that paralyzes the Bush administration is that American teenage girls might get easy access to emergency contraception and turn into shameless hussies. But contraception generally doesn't cause sex, any more than umbrellas cause rain.

The reality is that almost two-thirds of American girls have lost their virginity by the time they turn 18 — and one-quarter use no contraception their first time. Some 800,000 American teenagers become pregnant each year, 80 percent of the time unintentionally.

So we may wince at the thought of a 15-year-old girl obtaining Plan B after unprotected sex. But why does the White House prefer to imagine her pregnant?

Indeed, Plan B may be more important for teenagers than for adults, because adults are more likely to rely on a regular contraceptive. Teenagers wing it.

Granted, making contraceptives available — all kinds, not just Plan B — presents a mixed message. We encourage young people to abstain from sex, and then provide condoms in case they don't listen. But that's because we understand human nature: We also tell drivers not to speed, but provide air bags in case they do.

The administration's philosophy seems to be that the best way to discourage risky behavior is to take away the safety net. Hmmm. I suppose that if we replaced air bags with sharpened spikes on dashboards, people might drive more carefully — but it still doesn't seem like a great idea.


Of course Kristof doesn't actually come out and say what drives these people -- their desire to see women -- and ONLY women -- punished for being sexually active. Wages, sin, death, etc., and all that. But he is absolutely right to point out that if you are going to make contraception, even emergency contraception, unavailable, you ARE going to have more abortions. And once abortions are illegal, you are going to have more women dying of septic infections from trying to abort themselves or resorting to illegal abortions -- which may be the whole point of these people's objections.

Those who object to emergency contraception claim that it is an early abortion because it prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. By that logic, as I've written before, giving every fertilized egg the rights of a human being means that every woman's menstrual period every month must be investigated, because up to 40% of fertilized eggs never implant and are passed as a normal period. But preventing implantation is only ONE way EC works. The other two ways are by affecting sperm and/or egg so as to prevent fertilization, or by delaying release of an egg from the ovary. But even if we want to focus on the "preventing implantation" angle, we're once again putting women with uterine problems in the crosshairs of the anti-abortion movement. Diseases like endometriosis can also prevent implantation -- are we going to prosecute women with this disease?

Kristof's column is a good start, but I'd like to see more mainstream columnists point out the logical extension of the "Every Egg is Sacred" preposterousness of the anti-sex "Christian" (sic) right wing.
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