For BC & EC, How Young Is Too Young?

Last month, I posted for Back Up Your Birth Control Day and mentioned that the courts wanted the FDA to consider lowering the age of prescription-less access to emergency contraception from 18 to 17. The FDA considered it, and they have agreed.

On last month's BC/EC post, Mächtige Maus and I started a discussion in the comments about how young is too young to have access to emergency contraception or birth control in general. In one of my comments, I brought up the issue of medication still being a drug. I wanted to elaborate on that a bit and stress the importance of testing and education about how birth control and EC affect women at different ages. If there is a big difference in the effects of these drugs in a 16-year-old versus an 18-year-old, then it stands to reason that more control should be placed on how the 16-year-old can access it. Does anybody know if this research is out there and, if so, what they've found?

Ultimately, it is hard to give an arbitrary age to something like this, especially given all the variables involved. Consider the fact that the average age of these occurrences are probably quite different:

• menarche (the first period) - around 12
• first instance of real sex education (not the abstinence-only kind) - this can vary tons depending on state and quality of education, but let's guess 13-15
• first sexual experience - around 17
• when society wishes the first sexual experience was - I'll just throw out 18-21

So what age are we supposed to go by? Do you folks have any thoughts?

Back Up Your Birth Control with EC

Today is the Back Up Your Birth Control Day of Action!

The Back Up Your Birth Control campaign focuses on increasing awareness of and accessibility to emergency contraception (EC). It's important to get the right information out there about EC. It is NOT the abortion pill. It is NOT dangerous. It is NOT 100% effective (no form of contraception is).

It always amazes me how little some women know about EC and how it works. In college I was the Women's Studies Major, well of reproductive health information, so people always came (some still come) to me with their questions. I'm going to put that hat on right now and provide a little 411 for those reading who don't know:

You use EC, also known as the morning-after pill or Plan B, up to 3-5 days after you've had unprotected sex in order to prevent a pregnancy. The sooner you take it after intercourse, the better. It basically works like amped up birth control -- it uses hormones to stop fertilization or implantation. Because of this, it doesn't actually stop a pregnancy if it's already happened. You should take a pregnancy test before you get the EC because it'll be useless to take it if you're already pregnant. I repeat, it is NOT the abortion pill. The side-effects are similar to what you'd experience taking the pill, perhaps a bit more intense depending on your body and the hormone levels you're used to.

Currently in the U.S., EC is available over the counter if you're over 18 -- YAAAAY! For the time being, those under 18 need to have a prescription, but the age is being pushed down to 17 and the courts are asking the FDA to consider removing the age restrictions. (You can take action to make that happen here.) ETA: There are other barriers to access that you can read about here (PDF), including cost, coverage, supply, etc.

So there's your education for the day. If you have any other questions, you can ask them in the comments or email me.

Head on down to the pharmacy and stock up on EC. Go with your friends and have them do the same. And keep a stash handy so you can help somebody out when there's an emergency.

(Cross-posted at Jump off the Bridge.)

The Implications of Redefining Life

North Dakota, as you've probably heard, has passed a bill that states “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens” is a person deserving of full civil rights. Can you name three disturbing implications of this new definition of ''human"? Kris-Stella of Coffee Shop Philosophy can, and if you haven't read her post you should do so here.

URGENT Action: Bush's Conscience Rule

Bush seems determined to make some of his worst decisions in the final days of his presidency. He's just upped the ante by issuing the "conscience" rule, which gives health providers (including pharmacists) the right to refuse performing procedures or giving treatments that are against their religious or moral beliefs.

Here are a few scenarios in which this rule can be applied:

1) Somebody goes to the doctor, learns she is pregnant and subsequently decides to have an abortion (for WHATEVER reason). The doctor believes abortion is immoral. The doctor can not only deny giving her a completely legal abortion, but doesn't need to give her information on how to get one or who to speak to for counsel on having one.

2) A couple decides that in addition to wearing a condom, they will use birth control for extra protection. The local pharmacist, however, believes using birth control is a sin and refuses to fill the completely legal prescription. Said pharmacist does not need to refer the couple to another pharmacy that will fill the prescription.

3) A woman has been living with AIDS after a blood transfusion for several years. She moves to a new town and goes to get her prescription filled a new pharmacy. The local pharmacist believes AIDS is a punishment from God and refuses to fill the completely legal prescription. Said pharmacist, again, does not need to refer this woman to a pharmacy that will fill the prescription.

In all of these scenarios, I've used a different reason that might be against somebody's religious or moral beliefs. In all of these scenarios, the procedure or medication was completely legal. In all of these scenarios, the health provider was not required to give the patient the information they need to receive their legal health care.

If you're as outraged as I am, you can take action NOW! Planned Parenthood has an online petition. Rachel Maddow has posted the phone number for the White House on her show's website (with a link to an MSNBC article) so that we can CALL, CALL, AND CALL AGAIN. We need to act now in order to send a message that we want this rule reversed as soon as possible.

(Cross-posted at Jump off the Bridge)

1 Reason the Pro-Choice Message is Gaining Traction

A pharmacy in Chantilly, VA is now "...refusing as a matter of faith to sell contraceptives of any kind, even if a person has a prescription." As the Associated Press explains:

States across the country have been wrestling with the issue of pharmacists who refuse on religious grounds to dispense birth control or morning-after pills, and some have enacted laws requiring drug stores to fill the prescriptions.

In Virginia, though, pharmacists can turn away any prescription for any reason.

The report goes on to note that throughout the United States there are at least seven other pharmacies that are also refusing to carry contraceptives or fulfill any type of prescription having to do with birth control.

Ann at Feministing and Jessica at Jezebel have already done an excellent job of pointing out why this trend is troubling. Yet, particularly since this pharmacy is located so close to my old neighborhood, I couldn't resist mentioning this story here. Besides, it seems to provide an answer to the question posed by Tim Fernholz yesterday at The American Prospect: Why has the pro-choice message gained so much more traction this year than it has in previous election cycles? In the past it seemed to me that the anti-choice retoric used by conservative politicians was just a cynical ploy to excite their base and, while still repugnant, represented no real threat. Roe v. Wade had established the law of the land, I thought, and there wasn't much the fundamentalists could do to erode our rights. Now, though, I feel like cases like these are cropping up frequently enough that I realize there is an increasing threat to women's rights to make our own reproductive choices - and an attack on a woman's right to preventative birth control seems like a particularly sinister and wrong-minded example of the gradual gains being made by the anti-woman crowd.

Simply put, examples like these have made us more aware of the possiblity that we could actually lose the rights over our bodies that we fought for so long to gain.

HSS Proposal to Let Doctors Refuse Abortions: Comment Deadline

If you haven't submitted your comments regarding the Department of Health and Human Services' proposed rule that would let any medical provider refuse any treatment to any patient at any time, today is the day to act. We know that this rule is intended to make it more difficult for women seeking medical help with abortions or birth control, yet anyone could be affected. If your doctor decides it would be against his code of ethics to provide fertility treatment to a WOC or a lesbian, for example, this rule would open room for him to refuse treatment. In short, this rule is not someone else's problem - it has the potential to impact all of us.

Tomorrow is the deadline, so it is imperative that we speak now. Two ways to submit comments include visiting the Regulations.gov website and submitting a comment on their site (docket number HSS-OS-2008-0011) or emailing consciencecomment@hhs.gov (put HSS-OS-2008-0011 in the subject line).

To be sure, the point of this HSS rule is to limit abortion access, and some will argue that it will not be interpreted in a way that will impact anyone but women seeking to terminate a pregnancy. Of course, even this intended interpretation of the HSS's proposed rule takes choices away from women and families and allows doctors to deny assistance to patients seeking medical care.

It is time for the anti-choice crowd to stop pretending that all situations are the same and attempting to to write rules to fit one ideal scenario in which bringing a pregnancy to term is a viable option. Who should make the decision in cases like those of Tiffany Campbell, who discovered that she must terminate one twin fetus or loose both? Who should make the choice for a woman who's life might be put at risk by bringing a pregnancy to term? Who should decide for a woman with limited financial resources living in a country where medical bills routinely bankrupt working people who discovers that the fetus would be born with an illness that would require constant care and frequent medical treatments? Who should make these decisions - some Bush appointee or a doctor who believes that it is his or her right to deny legal medical procedures to anyone deemed unworthy?

Please join us in telling the HSS that women deserve the right to expect their doctors to provide medical services, not over-simplified world views and moral judgments.

(h/t to This Is What a Feminist Blogs Like, which has tirelessly provided information on this proposal from the start.)

HSS to Allow Doctors to Deny Treatments on Moral Grounds

Just when we were celebrating California's Supreme Court ruling that doctors can't refuse treatments to lesbians or gays due to religious beliefs, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has started pushing to ensure that doctors can refuse to provide abortions based on moral grounds. HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt explains this new attempt to blur the line between health care provider and clergy this way:

"Freedom of conscience is not to be surrendered upon issuance of a medical degree," Leavitt said. "This nation was built on a foundation of free speech. The first principle of free speech is protected conscience."

Let me just point out here that there are many branches of medicine that a person could practice which in no way involve providing abortions, and only one that does. So perhaps the better answer would be for individual medical professionals to not choose fields where their duties conflict with their beliefs. Also unclear is whether or not doctors would be allowed to object to providing abortions to only certain types of people - say, on the basis of sexual orientation, marital status, or race.

Also worrisome is this:

The underlying laws deal mainly with abortion and sterilization, but both the laws and the language of the rule seem to recognize that objections on conscience grounds could involve other types of services.

That's right, under the HSS's new rule, any type of medical procedure could be denied due to any member of the facility's beliefs - since "regulation is written to apply to a broad swath of the health care work force," a hospital worker who decided it was morally wrong for him to, say, provide a certain type of person with lifesaving medications might be covered.

As PalMD of Denialism recently wrote, "...a physician must be careful not impose his or her personal beliefs on patients." In a discussion of Dr. Christine Brody's refusal to provide fertility treatments to Guadalupe T. Benitez (the act of discrimination that eventually led to the CA Supreme Court ruling mentioned at the first of this post), PalMD explains:

Conflicted with the doctor's faith. There's the rub.

This is a particularly perverse form of prostelitizing. It doesn't involve having coffee with an acquaintance and teaching them the Word. It involves a vulnerable individual, who comes to a qualified professional for help, and is turned away because of "improper" living and thinking.
...
For a physician to deny a patient care based on their own beliefs is a cop-out, and is a coercive use of their paternalistic powers.

The HSS is in the wrong and its new rule is aimed at denying medical services to women. Worse, as Broadsheet notes, the ruling:

...goes far beyond defending a medical worker's right to refuse to perform an abortion -- it also secures his or her right to refuse to "refer for, or make other arrangements for, abortions." In other words, a worker at a women's clinic, perhaps the only one for several hundred miles, can refuse to perform an abortion and refuse to refer the patient to someone who will.

This seems to be a serious attack on our medical freedoms.

UPDATE: Both NARAL and Planned Parenthood have letters you can sign and send to help ensure this rule does not go into effect. (h/t Jump off the Bridge)

All birth control is now an “abortion?”

I’ll admit that in the beginning even I was a bit skeptical about the idea that the anti-abortion was going to have any chance of success in taking away women’s birth control. Sure they’d make some noise and make a lot of people nervous, but it wouldn’t really *happen.*

But the evidence is starting to pile up that they might have some success in, if not completely outlawing contraception, they can make it a lot more difficult to get.

The New York Times has a story about a leaked proposal that Health and Human Services (HHS) was circulating that would redefine all hormonal contraception as an “abortion.” Cristina Page writes about it here and here.

Now the reason why HHS would take this route is that by redefining contraception as “abortion” it gets around the Weldon and Church amendments, two laws that prohibit any agency receiving federal money from being required to offer abortion services. So if birth control becomes the same as abortion, there are a lot of ways this will have an effect on women’s ability to get contraception.

One of the main effects is that in 27 states there are laws requiring any employer that cover s prescription drugs to also cover contraception (because it’s not an “elective,” its not a cosmetic. It’s a regular part of health care for women and hence, if you cover diabetes medication employers should also be forced to cover birth control.) HHS’s proposed redefinition would then wipe out the state laws.

It would also immediate overcome any state rules about requiring pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception, or requiring hospitals to offer it to rape victims.

Now here’s the thing about the so-called “right” for pharmacists to refuse to dispense medication, Susan Paynter in the Seattle PI has a lot of good examples of what happens when you allow pharmacists to suddenly make snap judgments about their customers.

And, at a pharmacy in Seattle, a woman's prescription for a cervix-dilating medication was refused by a pharmacist who suspected she was on her way to have an abortion. Not that it ought to matter, but the woman's physician prescribed the drug because she was about to have surgery for uterine fibroids.

And, in Yakima, a pharmacist refused to dispense syringes to a diabetic, assuming he was an IV drug user. And there are more infuriating scenarios, says Nancy Sapiro of the Northwest Women's Law Center.

I don’t understand why moralists who think that requiring pharmacists to dispense birth control – even if they don’t like their customers – is any different than refusing to sell condoms (or disposable syringes) to “certain people” because, well you just don’t like them. Pharmacists are regulated by their own boards (and many state and federal laws) that say you don’t get to pass judgment on your customers.

Meaning you are not allowed to discriminate against people because of their gender, skin color or religion. What if some atheist pharmacist refused to dispense heart medication to the local pastor because he/she didn’t like their sermons and wanted him to get sick and die. Isn't that part of the atheist's religious freedom? Can’t the local pastor just go SOMEWHERE ELSE to get his necessary medication? Wouldn’t that be infringing on the atheist pharmacist right to not sell to only people whose lives he approves of? Oh wait that's a ridiculous example you say? But is it?

Deborah Kotz has more.

FYI -- I'm thrilled habladora has asked me to contribute to Feminist Underground.

--cross-posted at NewsCat