There's Got To Be A Morning-After Pill

I've been following the debate over allowing the "morning-after" contraception pill for all teenage girls as opposed to allowing it only for girls aged fifteen and over, and I have come to the following conclusion . . . Americans are insane.

Or maybe they're just inane. A federal judge has ruled against the Obama administration's restrictions on the morning-after pill, which only allow legal adult women and seventeen-year-old girls to purchase them, with the pills themselves kept under lock and key instead of on the shelves; the ruling says the pill should be offered to all females thirteen and over. The Justice Department is appealing the ruling. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, has decided instead to lower the age restrictions to fifteen years of age and selling the pills on the shelves near condoms, so long as anyone who purchases them have IDs proving their ages. Women's groups say this doesn't go far enough, while social conservatives - who would be much happier if the morning-after pill were banned altogether - say it goes too far.

Why can't they just make the damn pills available to all, without restrictions, and be done with it? Because if 15-year-old and 16-year-old girls need IDs to buy them, what are they going to use - their library cards? Not too many girls under seventeen have driver's licenses, and certainly none in New Jersey, where you have to be seventeen to have a driver's license. And if boys and girls under fifteen are sexually active, maybe the availability of morning-after pills isn't the issue.

So, as I was saying . . . oh, right, Americans are insane. Well, they must be, if contraception, especially emergency contraception, has actually become a big political issue. I thought providing women the means to take care of their own health and take charge of their own bodies, which include contraceptives, was something that, I don't know, made sense. None of this controversy does. Meanwhile, while we're hemming and hawing over this, the Koch brothers, Chuck and Dave (sister Vera is still at large), hope to buy a bunch of newspapers to promote a reactionary agenda that will affect far more than just the contraception debate.

Right now, I'm searching for sanity in These States, and I hope to find it. And I'll escape the darkness . . . I won't be searching anymore.