Dana L. Says
Written by Carmine on June 5th, 2006This was brought to my attention from our good friend over at the EIB Network (Rush). The entire logic of this article is one familiar to anyone who has worked tirelessly in the effort to protect the unborn. Dana L. seeks to turn the debate away from facts and toward the emotional - pinning the blame for the “termination of pregnany” (ie: murder of her third child in utero) on President Bush and his administration. The reader is supposed to be overcome by emotion and sympathy for a mother driven to such desparate action by an arch conservative. This is not surpring given the leftist habit of lying blame on anyone and everyone but the responisble party.
I did smile with pleasure as she sought to wave off the “protestors” who “chided” her at the door of the Planned PArenthood as extremists of some sort. I have counseled there as a Pro-Life Sidewalk Advocate with these people she sneers at. They are all young, dedicated college students (from Catholic, Maryland, GW, etc.) and know that they were certaintly doing a great work that day.
Dana L.’s article was laughable at best. I only wish I could agree with her that abortion and the Plan B pill were so hard to access - sadly, the fact is, the nature of the situation in the US is exactly the opposite of what she described .
6
PM
I’m rather hesitant to even comment on this, as I’ve been following it on a number of feminist blogs. But… I’ve got to ask: Plan B and abortion are easy to access in this country? Are you kidding me? Have you been following the struggles to ensure that pharmacies stock Plan B, so that women can access it in a timely fashion? Have you not heard the numerous examples of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for Plan B? Of doctors refusing to write prescriptions on ideological grounds?
Do you know the statistics on even moderate sized towns and access to Plan B? It’s not as easy as you might think. Not everyone lives next to a Planned Parenthood, and, as the author points out, if your doctor refuses the medication, and you have few choices (think: HMO’s, health insurance that requires you go to a certain doctor, etc.), you might very well find yourself in the situation of calling random doctors in the yellow pages.
I think this was an amazing plea for making Plan B more accessible. Ideally, we’d lower the abortion rate by making sure that women actually get ahold of contraception. (It’s telling that no major anti-choice organizations actually support increased access to contraception.) Women shouldn’t have to be in the position of calling/visiting up to what, five, ten different doctors? Just to get a prescription for a medication that doctors overwhelmingly acknowledge is safe and effective. Would we rather that women prevent pregnancy from occurring, or would we rather they resort to having abortions? I think the answer is clear. (The answere is still clear, even if you think that in very rare cases Plan B prevents implantation — according to medical science, pregnancy doesn’t start till implantation. And why would you rather a woman have an abortion than prevent imiplantation??)
Think about it. What is a woman supposed to do if she and her partner engage in sex — the birth control fails, or against their better judgment they neglect to use BC, etc. — and she then has 72 hours to find both a doctor and a pharmacist who will actually give her the prescription? 72 hours. What if it’s a Friday, and she has only one business day. Or insurance won’t cover the visit to another doctor who carries the medication. Or she can’t afford to take off work. The system is constructed so that it is difficult to get this medication that is incredibly time sensitive.
Further, this woman was on a cholesterol drug (category x) that has been shown to cause severe birth defects. Her doctor should have spoken to her about reliable birth control, and what to do in case of such an emergency. In fact, she probably has a case for malpractice, since he refused a prescription for Plan B while she was on this medication. This woman did her best to get the prescription, but was unable to procure it in the 3 day window due to doctors not doing their jobs, and to her responsibilities as a parent.
There’s a limit to how far you can take the “personal responsibility” argument, and I think that this story highlights where that line is located.
(As a further sidenote: If I were in the author’s shoes, I wouldn’t appreciate protestors either. Do those protestors want to go through labor for her? Adopt the child, even if there are massive birth defects? Pay the hospital bills? I wouldn’t appreciate having strangers — who don’t know my situation, my history, my decisions — trying to influence my actions. Further, with the amount of clinic violence committed by “pro-life” protestors, I can understand one being worried just to see them there. I don’t like being harassed even to take political or religious pamphlets, let alone when I’m trying to see a doctor.)
6
PM
Also, I’m sorry, but when you criticize this article for appealing to pathos, you do realize that the rhetoric of “pro-life” and conflating fetuses with babies does the exact same thing, right?
And who, exactly, is responsible for Plan B being inaccessible OTC? Who is responsible for doctors not prescribing it, or pharmacists denying access? Last I checked, not the author of this article.
7
AM
Quit being ridiculous. The author of the article, together with her husband, are responsible for her being pregnant to begin with. You take your chances and you accept the consequences.
7
AM
Ok… by that reasoning, when people don’t wear bike helmets, they should see that they took a chance, and should accept the consequences. What if the consequence is a broken bone — should they not try to remedy it? Would we refuse them painkillers, on the grounds that they “should have thought of that before”?
The fact is, Plan B is simply a larger dose of BC pills. This woman should have been able to easily procure this prescription (she’s a grown woman, not at all in the supposed “risk” category of preteens). There is no conceivable reason why a woman in our society should not be able to easily purchase Plan B for just such moments of lapses in judgment. Plan B doesn’t “cause” such lapses, anymore than hospitals cause people to neglect to wear their seat belt.
Again, I think as a society we need to realize when we put undo burdens and limitations on women’s reproductive freedom. We can’t make it next to impossible to receive the medication, and then point to women and say it’s their fault for not jumping through a magical number of hoops. If you’re anti-abortion, you ought to be pro-birth control (and Plan B, being so close in nature to the pill, ought to be included in that). This woman really has a malpractice suit on her hands if she wants to pursue it. At the very least, her doctor should have referred her to someone who could prescribe Plan B.
7
AM
Becky life begins before implantation. Preventing implantation is an abortion.
7
AM
Further from a moral and religius standpoint, certain types of birth control are forms of abortions. That is why I am pro-life and anti certain types of birth control.
We as a society must stop graying the lines between what is right or wrong. Must we reward those who make poor choices with easy access to medications that will easily negate that choice. I want people to know the hoops they will need to go through inorder to get plan b so that maybe just maybe they will make a better moral choice to begin.
This goes far beyond just the abortion issue. We must work against moral relativism where people must no longer face the consequences of their actions.
7
AM
I have no issue with birth control. It is simply unreasonable to expect people to have 10 children in today’s society when most families have a hard enough time supporting two.
However, this article by Dana L is nothing more than a typical whining liberal trying to blame someone else for her carelessness and one of most piss poor attempts I have ever seen to try and justify the slaughtering of unborn children. She identified the problem right away. She didn’t use her diaphragm. That’s it. End of story. Her and her husband are responsible for their unwanted pregnancy.
It’s called personal responsibility, something that has escaped most people in this country these days.
7
AM
Speaking as a pro-choice supporter of birth control, I agree with Sam that this article is nothing but trying to blame someone else. I would have fewer problems with abortion if people admitted some responsibility.
7
AM
I’m not saying that the author should take no responsibility — but her method of birth control isn’t 100% reliable as it is. Her doctor has a responsibility to make sure that she gets the medication she needs, and both the doctors she trusted failed her on that. This is especially important because she was on a category x drug. She DID try to get the drug. We should remember that not everyone has amazing healthcare in this country, and that it’s very hit or miss finding a combination of both doctor and pharmacist who won’t push their morals on the patient and deny a prescription. How many hoops is a woman supposed to have to jump through to get Plan B? (When most other industrialized nations sell it OTC?)
Further — if you want to believe that life begins before implantation, that’s fine. But the medical community and many other people in this country disagree. So it’s really not acceptable in my mind for others to decide that Plan B is therefore amoral, based on a personal belief. Science tells us that only 50% of fertilized eggs implant on the uterine wall — do you really keep track of every missed zygote and mourn its loss? What I have a problem with is the attempt in this country to mandate one opinion (which in my mind ignores the many other steps that result in a pregnancy) that results in women having less access to the birth control they choose to use.
Oh — and some studies done in the last year actually suggest that Plan B does not prevent implantation (as it has less time than normal BC pills to actually change the nature of the uterine lining). Its intended use is to prevent ovulation from even occurring — therefore rendering these “hoops” completely unnecessary and unethical — especially considering the damage it has on women’s lives who then end up having unintended pregnancies and possibly abortions.
7
PM
I’ll limit my comment to #3, since I really have no interest in the intricacies of whether a particular form of birth control is an abortofacient. We live in free society based on individual rights and capitalism. No one has the right to force a doctor to prescribe or a pharmacist to sell something they don’t want to distribute, be it Plan B, Viagra, or Immodium AD. Under that framework you had better be willing to accept the consquences of having unprotected sex before you engage in it. The responsibility lies with the lovers, not the medical community. Finally, a human life and a broken bone are two very different things. For your sake I’m glad your parents didn’t decide to “remedy” you.
7
PM
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but doctors do not have the right to limit treatment whenever they feel like it (on the contrary, I thought doctors actually had an ethical obligation to stop when they saw an accident victim). If they did have that right, we’d be living in an even crazier society. Imagine the possibilities. Don’t like gays? Then refuse medical treatment (or take a hint from that West Virginia police officer, who prevented another man from giving CPR to a dying gay man). Believe in scientology? Then spread the word by becoming a pharmacist who won’t fill any prescriptions. If you allow doctors to deny prescriptions, you’re basically on a slippery slope to allowing doctors to deny whatever treatments they don’t like at that particular moment, according to their particular biases.
My problem with this is that doctors and pharmacists are unfairly targeting women — have you EVER heard of a pharmacist denying a patient a viagra prescription? It’s women’s reproductive freedom that is at stake. What if all doctors/pharmacists were to decide to boycott Plan B for purely personal reasons? Many women in rural areas might be in the situation of either driving 100 miles, or foregoing certain types of birth control (including the pill). I’d argue that the medical community does have a responsibility to provide treatment to their patients, even if they don’t agree with their actions. (And that’s why I brought up the broken bone/accident analogy — you pretend that I conflate the two, when I’m merely pointing out a parallel circumstance to highlight the different cultural baggage and perspectives on “personal responsibility” which we bring to anything involving sex.)
Further, you say you aren’t going to involve yourself in the intricacies of which BC methods qualify as abortions, and yet you then go on to imply that Plan B has something to do with “a human life.” (And this is very explicit when you then identify me as the life in question!) I think this just serves to illustrate how deeply the conservative right has fought to conflate Plan B with abortion. If you equate Plan B with abortion, then you ought to also consider the pill in the same category.
And finally (because I need to stop typing these long comments that no one’s going to want to read!), I’m just curious about this “personal responsibility” business. Why does this only come up when we talk about sex? And I can’t for the life of me figure out why we want to punish women when they are trying to remedy a mistake by taking Plan B rather than later having an abortion or bringing an unwanted life into the world. (Also, we should keep in mind that women might need timely access to Plan B after the couple’s BC fails (condom breaks, for example), if they were raped, etc.). I think it’s taking personal responsibility to do what you can to prevent an unwanted pregnancy from occuring — even if you’re partially responsible for being in the situation of needing to prevent it in the first place.