Well, for heaven’s sake, we don’t want the wimminz thinking that sex is okay!  Society will self-destruct!  Men won’t be able to control their property!  Dogs and cats living together!  In sin!!!

It’s exclusively about shaming girls and women for having sex - there’s absolutely no reason why EC or any kind of contraception should require ID, except that the fundie right wingers think sex is icky dirty and nasty, and women, by association, are the same, so they should be shamed for the sin of Eve until the rapture, when presumably all the fundies will end up in a heaven devoid of all carnal pleasures and entirely populated with white, het, cis, males.

...Except that the fundie pols have an unnerving habit of getting themselves into sex scandals, so they might not be going there after all. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us, who think forcing any woman to give birth is unconscionable, see the attitudes for what they really are - punishment for being female.

Yeah, why do you have to ask for Plan B? They don’t ask you for your medical history or anything when they give it to you, so it can’t be a risky medication. What other drugs are non-prescription but kept behind the counter? I can’t think of any besides sudafed.

Also, does anyone else think asking for Plan B is intimidating? I once drove around to 5 pharmacies looking for it, and I got a lot of raised eyebrows and dirty looks from the pharmacists and people standing in the general area. (They might have mistaken me for a teenager; I was 22 but hear all the time that I look 18.) When I finally found a pharmacy that had it in stock, the two 30-something male pharmacists joked about how I must have had a good weekend. (With other customers in earshot.) Talk about an embarassing ordeal just to get birth control.

Well, whatever you think of <strike>teenagers under 17</strike> anyone having sex, I think we should agree that unintended pregnancy shouldn’t be the punishment.

Yes, I think this is the most important point.  Babies should not be punishment.

Basically, anything the government deems you can make illegal drugs with.  That’s it.  Putting EC in that category casts sex for women as a quasi-illegal activity, which it is not.

Wow—Ashley, that’s beyond inappropriate. If someone did that to me, I’d whip up tears in a jiffy, and just when they started feeling really guilty, I’d demand to speak to the manager. Assholes.

I think the reason that EC is denied to minors without parental approval is basically because some people feel like they own their children.  It seems obvious that young teens would need anonymous EC the most, but their parents have the legal right to control all their actions.  Treating a 13 year-old as legally the same as a 5 year-old just doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, even if the FDA does the right thing and tells pharmacies that the drugs can be sold over-the-counter, most pharmacies are still going to put EC under lock-and-key and you’re going to have to ask someone to get it for you for the same reason condoms and pregnancy tests are under lock and key… the shoplifting rate for those items is pretty high because people get twitchy about sex and pregnancy and don’t want even the cashier knowing those intimate life details.

Get the Pill offers EC shipping via mail. I would suggest that people just keep it on hand… buy (either at the pharmacy or online) it so that when you (or friends or family) needs it you don’t have to go through what Ashley went through. That shit is stressful enough.

I sorta miss the days when troll comments were edited to be about bunnies.

It’s fun watching antis fish around for a reason to oppose Plan B, without admitting they oppose all contraception. For girls under 17, they cite parental rights. For everyone else, they either make false claims that it’s dangerous—or that it “kills babies” because it might prevent implantation. The Family Research Council put out a press release opposing Plan B on military bases because it Kills Babies.

@ Ashley Herzog

This might be easier said than done but, if you feel up to it, next time something like this happens don’t hesitate to let the pharmacists know that they’re behaving in an unprofessional manner.

Also, Plan B (two pills) has been discontinued and replaced with Plan B One-Step (one pill).

That “parental rights” horseshit is just awful. Funny how they don’t want teenage girls to get parental permission to engage in pregnancy and childbirth, which are incredibly dangerous activities.

I don’t think the pharmacists intended to be rude, but it was definitely embarassing for me. I think the prospect of embarassment alone might be enough to keep some women from getting it. I have a friend who refused to even throw the Plan B box out at home—she made sure to wrap it in the CVS bag and dump it in a garbage can outside the store. If people go to that length to prevent people they know from finding out they took Plan B, surely some don’t want to face a condescending pharmacist in the first place.

Then, as Mighty Ponygirl suggested, online shopping is a good alternative. Order it in advance to insure you have it handy, and use a reputable place like Get the Pill and Amazon.

Funny how they don’t want teenage girls to get parental permission to engage in pregnancy and childbirth, which are incredibly dangerous activities.

Of course they do.  They just don’t think they can get away with admitting it.

@ catgirl: EC is not denied to minors without parental approval (at least not universally), they need a prescription. While I agree that that’s nonsense, they don’t (necessarily) have to tell their parents about it to get it, they have to tell a doctor (or a nurse practitioner at a family planning clinic).

@ ema: the 2 pill EC has not been discontinued. There is now the generic (Next Choice) which is still 2 pills, as well as the Plan B One Step.

When I hear guys make jokes like the ones aimed at Ashley, I always wonder if they realize that they’re basically saying they get laid so rarely they think it’s a big event for someone else.  I can’t help but think “Well, I have sex practically every weekend.  Isn’t that normal for most people?” 

This, of course, shows that the point is to make women specifically feel ashamed, by suggesting that getting laid is not normal and that you should take time to acknowledge how insane it is that you touched a penis.  Which is so weird, on top of misogynist.

“You should take time to acknowledge how insane it is that you touched a penis.”

Uh, is it weird that the stares and jokes made me feel like I was “out”? As in, “Yes, I’ve had sex. You caught me.”

Another thing: Why does Plan B cost 50 bucks? That’s about 5 times as expensive as a regular birth control prescription, as far as I know.

FWIW: “Behind the counter”: in Canada (most blessed of countries), acetaminophen with codeine is available sans prescription, but ‘behind the counter’.  Not sure why.

sure would be nice to be able to get that stuff down here, it’s like 5X more effective than anything the US allows w/o prescription.

@ Jasmine

As I mentioned, Plan B (2 pill pack) has been discontinued and replace by Duramed with Plan B One-Step (1 pill pack).

Next Choice* (2 pill pack) is a generic available from Watson, and the i-Pill (1 pill pack) is available form Cipla.

*Ignore the label instructions; take both pills at the same time.

MP,
Where the hell do you shop for condoms, et al?  We have them out in the open in CVS, Walmart, Target, Walgreens and Rite Aid.  At Taget, it’s like an 8 foot section of top 3 rows for condoms, lube, foam, etc.  Granted, Rite Aid has it right in front of the pharmacist, likely for the shoplifting reason.

Unfortunately, even if the FDA does the right thing and tells pharmacies that the drugs can be sold over-the-counter, most pharmacies are still going to put EC under lock-and-key and you’re going to have to ask someone to get it for you for the same reason condoms and pregnancy tests are under lock and key…
Comment #7: Mighty Ponygirl on 03/23 at 09:29 AM

Suggest this might be a “varies by region or neighborhood” because here in suburban-caucasian-midwest land, the Walgreens and CVS have all that right out in the open along with teh tampons and ovulation predictors; though not the plan B

helen, w.h.—it depends on location. I’ve lived in places that squirrel the condoms away and I’ve lived in places that have them out in the open. Is it so hard to believe that it happens?

I’m a guy and picked some up for my gf this weekend and didn’t have anybody look at me twice…the perks of being a 40 yo male is obviously I am supposed to be in charge of somebody else’s uterus.  What weirdos at the CVS in michigan.

Exactly what side effects of EC would possibly be more dangerous or not also common to carrying a pregnancy to term?

One reason condoms, etc. are kept under lock and key is high rates of shoplifting.  Seriously.  Some places also keep preparation H in the lockup, and other things not related to sex and drugs that simply have a high vapor pressure.

BTW, how long a shelf life does EC have?  I should stock some in case my son’s female friends, who talk to him about stuff a lot, need some.  Then again, he knows that I’d get some for them if need be.

Can men buy plan b pills?

Sometimes it seems like the “children are a blessing crowd” people co-mingle with “sex should be punished with a child” crowd combine to create a perfect storm where unintended pregancies get carried to term in many cases where they shouldn’t be.

Buying EC is so needlessly humiliating. I had a mishap a couple weeks ago and needed some. I went to the line at the pharmacy where a young woman was working and she said i needed a consultation in order to buy the pill. So this older woman came and gave me a stern lecture about how that pill would make me sick (it didn’t) and I need to use a better form of bc (i do, i just fucked it up). I felt like a naughty little girl, and halfway expected the woman to send me to bed without dinner. I just wanted to die.

Also, where I live condoms and pregnancy tests and the like all have those devices that trigger store alarms because they are such a high risk for shoplifting. I live near a university though, so it might be something to do with the number of young people around. One of my friends bought condoms for the first time and the checkout person didn’t deactivate the alarm properly so he had to get searched at the door.

I think all hormonal BC should be prescribed by a doctor/nurse/etc for the simple reason that most people don’t know how it works and how to use it right. (Although obviously emergency BC would be an exception due to its time sensitive nature-In a perfect world people could pop by their doctor at any time and get it) When it comes to pregnancy prevention using your meds right is kind of important. Seriously there was a recent study about it and the results were scary. There was the classic not taking the pill on time and thinking you could do _X_ and magically make it better. And also stuff like women doubling up on different forms of hormonal BC. Do you know how bad that can screw up your endocrine system? Yikes! And it makes the BC less effective too. With our craptacular sex ed system I think it is so very important for women to get this information from a doctor/nurse/etc. And on another note a lot of comments here have been talking about the pharmacist going all judgy on them when they try to buy emergency BC (which is beyond wrong/unprofessional/douchebaggy), but don’t you think the cashier is just as likely to do this? Is a judgy pharmacist worse than a judgy cashier?

Note. I am a little biased in that hormonal BC makes my skin crawl. Hormonal BC isn’t as awful as the religeous right and sex shamers LIE to make it sound. But I think in the effort counter all those lies people go too far and forget that it CAN have severe side effects.

Kiki, your concern is noted.  However, since nobody seems to be advocating that all hormonal contraception have OTC status, please try to stay on topic.

Kiki, you don’t necessarily have to speak to a cashier at all, whereas it is much more common to have some verbal interaction with a pharmacist. The morning after pill is a one time pill and so well done instructions should be adequate to explain usage, side effects, etc. If people aren’t going to pay attention, they aren’t going to pay attention, and there are limits to what hand holding will do for them. Also, as is made clear upthread, there are limited options for morning after while for daily bc there are many.

On a completely different note, is it absolutely necessary that the adorable bunnies have the most annoying fucking voices? Do only Glendale-born sorority girls in time warped Deloreans from 1985 experience condom breakage?

Men can buy Plan B, as far as I know.

Yeah, there’s a big difference between buying EC over the counter and buying hormonal contraception. As someone who very nearly committed suicide because I was on the wrong mix of hormones, I wouldn’t support OTC BC, but BC and EC are different enough that OTC EC is a no-brainer. And I’m not sure why you felt the need to point this out, kiki, because as catgirl said, we’re not talking about OTC BC, only EC, and they’re not the same thing at *all*. (The same pills, in many cases, but the effect of taking a megadose of hormones just once vs. the effect of taking a lower dose for months or years… hormones work over time. Humans will *never* respond to a one-time dose of hormones the same way they would to low levels over time.)

madmatt just said upthread that he was
a) a man
b) a purchaser of EC.

So yes. Men are allowed to buy EC. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be allowed to. They can pick up tampons, they can pick up pregnancy tests, they can even pick up their partner’s BC pills if they sign for them.

I don’t know that there’s a single cash-and-carry item, in fact, that one gender is “allowed” to purchase whereas another is not.

I guess I’m lucky that every time I’ve had to purchase EC (or drive a friend to the pharmacy for it), the pharmacists I’ve encountered have always been professional.  That would be pretty awful, to have to deal with an unpleasant and disrepectful person just to get EC.

That said, while I think the age restrictions should be abolished, I don’t mind having to ask the pharmacist for EC—in fact, I’d much rather ask the pharmacist who is (at least in theory) a professional who understands the need to be respectful and discreet than ask a cashier or clerk.  Considering that I need to show ID to the pharmacist to buy OTC cold medicine and considering that I have to ask someone to unlock a plexi-box to get condoms, pregnancy tests, nicotine patches or yeast infection medicine, it just never seemed embarressing to me to ask a pharmacist for EC.

Canadian Girl—I think there’s a huge gulf between your experience and the American experience because in America we have this “conscience clause” nonsense in a lot of states where pharmacists can declare that they have a moral objection to filling birth control prescriptions and still keep their job when they confiscate that prescription or tell a woman she’s going to hell for getting EC. There are fundamentalist churches down here that are urging their unemployed parishites to get Pharmacy degrees so that they can Do God’s Work By Punishing Sluts.

When you have a small enough community, with limited choices for getting your prescriptions filled, this sort of stuff can add up quick.

Plan B and other emergency contraceptives can be purchased by anyone 17 or older, even men.  Unless there might be some local or state law preventing it, but I don’t know any examples of places where that is the case.

It definitely IS something that is good to have on hand.  I work at a job where I answer phones for about two dozen Planned Parenthoods.  Our setup is such that if any one of those locations is open, we are there to answer the phones for all the others as well, so I happen to know that on the weekends a huge portion of our phone traffic is people calling closed clinics asking whether they can come in for EC.  We direct them to whatever local pharmacies are open but because of cost (0-42 dollars based on income with us, 45-55 flat at a pharmacy) a lot of people end up waiting until the clinic is open which is often several days, making the pill a lot less effective or worthless.  Unless you are a person of means living in an urban center, it is something you should probably keep around.  And even then, if you have a condom break at 10pm on a Saturday you will be glad you don’t have to wait until 10am on Sunday for the pharmacy to open to get your EC.

in America we have this “conscience clause” nonsense in a lot of states where pharmacists can declare that they have a moral objection to filling birth control prescriptions and still keep their job when they confiscate that prescription or tell a woman she’s going to hell for getting EC.

Yet another reason why I’m still glad I voted for Rod Blagojevich.  This shit started in Illinois, and he signed an executive order barring pharmicist from confiscating scripts.  They don’t have to fill the script if it’s “against their conscience” as long as there is another pharmacist on staff who will do the job.  If it’s not in stock, they are required to order it or refer you to another nearby pharmacy of your choice that will fill the prescription.

Posted by every pharmacy counter is a notice advising people of their rights regarding birth control, which means they can get it filled there or have the script returned.

“The pharmacy will be expected to accept that prescription and fill it in the same way and in the same period of time they would fill any other prescription. No delays. No hassles. No lecture.”

Blago as governor

4 assholes sued Walgreens for firing them b/c they announced their refusal to obey the law, but they lost the case.

Refreshingly honest, Austin.  Bat-poop insane, but honest.

Aww, how cute, Austin is back!  I was just reminiscing about the fun we had with his basic lack of knowledge in biology, and lamenting that other trolls simply aren’t as entertaining.  I thought he was too humiliated to come back after that, but either he skimmed through a bio textbook and feels confident, he hopes that we all forgot, or he simply humiliated himself at all other sites and he’s back to this one now.  Oh Austin, won’t you please explain to us again how sexual reproduction works in plants?  I could really use a good laugh right now.

it allows people to substantially alter the sex act in a way that seperates it from procreation, i.e. long-term committments.

Prove to me why sex should be coupled with long-term commitment.  “God says so” won’t convince me.

I’d like to know why using contraception with my husband somehow negates or elimintes the longtern commitment that is our marriage.  We don’t even use contraception because we DONT WANT kids (we do!) we actually use it because the hard numbers of our working hours and our finances make affording daycare (or one of us being a homemaker) a complete impossibility.

In your view, does that mean that we should be abstinent within our marriage until one of us gets a big promotion, or what?

If you could socially construct sexual relationships as lifetime commitments, there would be less divorce, among other things.

Prove to me that divorce is worse than the alternatives.

You don’t even have a plan to reduce out of wedlock births, marital conflict, divorce, or adultery, do you?

Ending sex stigma, promoting empowerment, and promoting safe sex.  Please don’t tell me that you think abstinence-only sex ed is effective at reducing unwanted pregnancy.  I know that you’re out of touch with reality, but you can’t be that ignorant of the facts.

Do you even see them as being problematic?

Any unwanted pregnancy is problematic, whether in wedlock or not.  That’s why I want EC to be more easily available to, you know, prevent pregnancies from happening.  I don’t think out of wedlock births are problematic for people who plan to have them.  Planned out of wedlock births are better than unplanned births within a marriage.  I don’t think that divorce is bad when you consider the alternatives to it.  Marital conflict and cheating are problematic, but you haven’t explained how your little scheme would reduce either of those things.

Honey, you should know by now that I’m not going to fall for your Catholic-school parroting unless you really have a good argument and maybe some evidence.  Keep up the entertainment though!

Out of wedlock (I’d say “unintended” or “unwanted” instead, since out od wedlock isn’t automatically an aweful thing) births are pretty well dealt with by contraception, if my incrediby obvious and simple logic has not failed me.

As far as marital conflict, divorce and adultery go, I think that getting into marriage because you just WANT to be married to someone goes a long way.  A big part of that is having the freedom to take some time, mature as an individual, and date different people to really decide who you are and who you want to spend your life with.  In other words, social liberalism is our plan for dealing with most of that bad stuff.  It has proven quite effective in the places where it is implemented (eg. Scandanavia), whereas your plan of abolishing contraception in order to magically improve society has never worked anywhere.

Interesting, Austin - here’s something for you to think about:

Contraception definitely DECREASES both marital conflict the likelihood that I’ll contribute to the divorce rate.

Why? Because if my husband insisted that I get pregnant right now, I’d divorce him. We’re both much happier with the alternative.

Children have been shown to be by far the biggest stress in marriage, and marital satisfaction decreases when children are born and increases when they move out.

What an ignorant little troll.

Forgoing contraception in favor of NFP resulted in a baby we weren’t in any way ready for and has put our marriage under incredible stress. The recipe for reducing marital conflict, this is not it.  Divorce may yet be avoided but believe me it isn’t a sure thing. At least I learned my lesson and got an IUD before we subjected more innocent children to this crap.

It’s the ID that strikes me as peculiar. I can cope with things being OTC, because in the UK lots of things are. Stuff is OTC if it is considered that it is a bit more “medicine” than paracetamol and the person buying it is effectively a patient and requires a consultation. In this category are things like codeine, Nytol, de-worming medicines, the stronger corticosteroids, antihistamines, and the morning-after pill. Basically, anything with risks or side-effects. All pharmacists should have a private space for consultation that the customer can request to use, so they should be able to discuss things in private. Of course, one still needs a pharmacist with a few people-skills who isn’t a religious bigot. But in general, that emergency contraception is only available OTC here isn’t a mental disjoint with other things, it is the natural category into which it falls.

However, an ID requirement strikes me as simply punitive. It simply isn’t the pharmacist’s business to know who I am when I am buying medicine. I can also appreciate that in the US, there are rather more bigoted pharmacists about who take the opportunity to lecture women or deny them the drug, and that this is a different situation in which there is potential for more harm from drug inaccessibility than from errors in use of the drug.

Surely a pharmacist confiscating a prescription he doesn’t wish to fill is theft?

Austin, what about marital conflict due to lack of good birth control? About living in fear of becoming pregnant again and hating sex and wanting to keep it to a minimum and fighting with a husband due to it? In the old days there was actual advice to women how to make sex less pleasant for a husband, so they’ll stop at number X child.

And if you think men cheated less in the past, learn some history. Women were supposed to ignore cheating until recently. Read about rates of prostitution then (17-18 century), much higher than now.

Besides, you believe in God, but you MUST NOT have a right to force people to behave according to YOUR beliefs. The same as atheists have no right to prevent you from going to church and leading religious lifestyle. What you describe is religious dictatorship, like in Arab countries, not democracy.

I am a woman, not a milk cow at the factory, which is forcibly made pregnant every year. Prior to good contraception women’s life was horrible imo, the roles restrictive and close to zero possibilities of acting as citizens (being doctors, political positions, etc) , developing as people in this world, unlike men. In a world without contraception women will always be second class citizens, chained by continuous births and childcaring. Thanks, but I prefer being able to get a good education and then a good job (with children, if one wants them), not having all my life defined only by 10 children, whom I don’t want (not so many). You don’t believe I am as much a person as you are, do you? Read about women’s position in the past, read what people explicitely wrote about prostitution (3-d class citizens) being necessary to prevent men from sleeping with “decent women”, about poor people being unable to marry due to cost of children, read about going to prostitutes and having mistresses being a STANDARD for married men… With women having more rights nowadays and being able to demand much more, adultary rates for men have declined a lot. It’s no longer acceptable, unlike in the past.

Austin, you’re adorable.

The idea is, if sexual relationships were cast as lifetime commitments, people would treat their marriages that way.

Before the sexual revolution, sexual relationships were cast as lifetime commitments. Shotgun weddings were pretty common because people forced what could have been a short-term sexual encounter with someone into a lifetime sentence. And if you think that people (especially men) treated their marriages like some sort of sacred sexual commitment back in those days, then hopefully that respirator will be paid for under universal health care because honey, you may be too stupid to breathe.

Just wanted to add, that you worry in vain. Most people want long term relationships and seek them, and, if somebody doesn’t, bad contraception would lead only to more unwanted children (reading about 17 or 18 century’s situation with numerous children left was illuminating). In the past, there were many unhappy marriages, officially married couples living separately, cheating, etc. Having birth control helps people not to marry at 18 with short-gun wedding or (as happended VERY often) to have father run away and be happy while woman’s reputation was destroyed. It helps people get high education and not live as a monk until 25-30 when salary starts coming in. Read about the past, bad contraception didn’t lead to any utopia. The most significant difference it brought was that Contraception let women control their lives as much as men always did.  That’s all. If you’re against women being free at last - be honest, instead of behaving as if you never read any history books or even novels describing women’s position and marriage’s state (more unhappy marriages than now).

Yes, exactly, what WomanReader said: “Contraception let women control their lives as much as men always did.” That was a MAJOR factor to turn the tables against the “extreme male privilege” Austin cites.

Oh, and that privilege? Austin, you’re steeping in it.

Before Austin started talking someone was talking about the joys of self check out. I bet stores with self check probably Have almost no problem with condom shoplifting. Plan b really should be available without a pharmacist looking at you when you buy it.

You can easily seperate the extreme male privilege of the early 20th centuries and before from the sort of sexual standards that prevailed in those times.

You mean the sexual standards that categorised women as either baby-bearing Madonnas or dirty, dirty whores? I’d be interested to hear exactly how you’d separate out extreme male privilege from those standards—even Islamic fundie mullahs are hard pressed to do that.

Also, sadly, those sexual standards are far from being things of the past, even in the U.S.

[Man, lots of crazies around here today—must be the health care bill that set them off]

The idea is, if sexual relationships were cast as lifetime commitments, people would treat their marriages that way.

Fantastic, but since you’re blue-skying you really should add in the unicorns and mermaids. Why hold back?

Austin at 55, you are so wrong. Think for a moment:

no contraception
—>
the moment average woman marries she quits working, at least quits working in a good, high-paying, DEMANDING job since being constantly pregnant and breast-feeding usually doesn’t go well with working as a lawyer, for example + women will not be hired for any high-paying positions, why would capitalists risk when a man won’t take several months off every year or decide cost of childcare for 5 kids >> salary and leave? Even today with contraception women are hired less, what about this horrible recreation of the past you describe?
—>
like in the past women as a class depend on men and lose their independance, their ability to have a career (even if this specific woman doesn’t even want children). A woman must marry to lead a middle class life, unless her male relatives support her.
—>
Extreme male priviledge returns! Woo-hoo! What is it, if not economical power, the understanding that you have much more power in a relationship than your wife will ever have, that even if you drink, cheat and beat her, she will have to stay with 5 children in order not to starve on her minimum wages salary? What is it, if not seeing women as second-class citizens, especially when they ARE so?

the moment average woman marries she quits working, at least quits working in a good, high-paying, DEMANDING job

WomanReader, you’re not seeing this from Austin’s honestly stated viewpoint. For him, the “average woman” (at least the one who isn’t a shameless slut) has no higher calling than to be the vessel of the product of her husband-for-life’s sacred sperm. A woman lawyer or physician or household breadwinner?! Ridiculous!

You might as well be arguing with Commander Fred from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Contraception kills the homunculus!!!1!!eleventy!!1!

(if you are unsure of the reference, see the last thread Austin Nedhead posted in)

I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but we re-wrote out wedding vows to specifically highlight the soul-crushing obligation of our life sentence together. Because that’s what sexual union means to US.

Do you [groom] take [bride] to be your lawfully wedded spouse
To resent and avoid, to feel trapped and burdened,
to fuck without joy
to raise more children than you can afford
while her body gives out and you wonder if Jabba the Hutt might be a better screw and she learns to hate your very touch,
until death do you mercifully part?

I DO.

While it’s unlikely that it does [prevent implantation], it is still realistically possible, and the possibility has not been disproven

Actually, it’s pretty much disproven.  EC is not in a woman’s system long enough to affect the uterine lining the same way regular BC, taken over a month, can.

You do understand the only way to discover if an egg is there before implantation is to carve the woman open, right?  Which would also result in terminating a pregnancy.  That’s why we don’t carve women up to see if there’s a fertilized egg floating about.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think Slutty McSlut Sluts should be carved up if they don’t cherish the idea of being a vessel for a homunculus, but we don’t usually grant them much respect in civilized society.

@30

The first comment did exactly that. Although I will will admit I did get a bit carried away

When I read #2, my first thought was “She should have stared them down and said ‘Actually, I was raped, so it wasn’t the best weekend ever.’”
Then I thought, “God, I’m so mean.”
Then I realised I wasn’t being mean at all, because the only time I ever had to get Plan B was the time that I was raped as a teenager. It was a foreign country where I barely spoke the language, and it wasn’t available without a prescription, and I didn’t want anyone to find out what had happened to me, and I was a particularly impractical and clueless teenager, and basically I remember the ordeal of trying to get the morning after pill as being more traumatic than the rape itself, though obviously there must be some kind of mental displacement going on there.
The doctors/doctor-and-nurse/whatever medical type people who wrote the prescription for me asked me if I was raped, or at least, they asked me if it was “bad”, and I froze up and didn’t say anything, and then they laughed and one of them said in English, “I think it’s all right,” and the memory of the jocular laughter still makes me a bit cringey, and that was more than ten years ago.

Just one little anecdote in favour of making getting hold of emergency contraception as quick and painless as possible, and against douchebaggy pharmacists making intrusive comments about other people’s personal lives, not that anyone with any brains needed persuading anyway.

Oh, and will the troll who thinks forced pregnancy is less bad than divorce please DIAF.

I may be misreading this conversation, but I think there’s a tinge of “my/my friends’ EC is perfectly justified, I/we don’t deserve to get hassled” in some of the posts. But the change in rules shouldn’t be about the people getting EC, it should be about the the people dispensing. Doesn’t matter if it’s a married woman with impeccable birth-control practices or an abstinence teacher who just went on a bender with the whole male membership of the Liz Cheney fan club. Whether they “deserve” in some system of beliefs to get hassled about their behavior isn’t as important as what shielding or not shielding them from that hassle says about our society.

(And while I’m off in cloud-cuckoo land, Gracchus has austin pegged. On another planet, where the long-established roles of men and women were completely different from those here, and where sexual practices were completely different and p-i-v sex had a completely different status than it does here, a statement like his about lifetime commitments might make even a tiny smidgeon of sense. But I don’t believe he believes his bullshit either; otherwise he wouldn’t offer the rape exception, which either vitiates his entire stand or earns him a shared hotel room with Bill Napoli.)

@Austin

I know I’m just going to be reinforcing what others, particularly WomanReader, have already said, but as a long-time student of 19th century social history I have to add my bit.  The system that believes that sex must be inextricably linked to procreation and procreation to life-long monogamous heterosexual marriage is absolutely patriarchal by it’s very nature.  It is a way of binding women into dependence and obedience to one man and removing her power to negotiate life on her own terms.  And if you want evidence, try reading some of the diatribes by Victorian opponents of women’s education; they’re pretty explicit about their desire to ensure that women only function as utterly dependent and obedient walking wombs. 

Oh, and when divorce was very expensive and difficult to obtain you did, of course, have a nation of devoted and mutually supportive life-long married partners.  Oh, sorry, no, what you had was a pretty high rate of out of wedlock births, a blind eye turned to domestic abuse, and a remarkably high rate of desertion and bigamy.

Sorry, blasphemed too soon.

Another thing that is made quite clear in those Victorian diatribes and prescriptions for the proper behaviour of polite young ladies, is that patriarchal marriage is a means of securing the unpaid labour of a woman while simultaneously making it as difficult as possible for her to opt out, protest or negotiate terms.  Advice to young men and surviving letters are quite frank about the fact that a wife is the most useful household appliance.  There are even jokes and cartoons from Punch magazine that talk about the ‘very best sewing machine there is’ meaning a wife.  How do you propose to revive the structure without all of THAT baggage re-surfacing?

Austin - speaking as the product of a marriage that both participants have treated as a lifetime commitment no matter what - divorce is a great, great thing. My parents should really try it, because watching them be miserable for fifty years, and watching that misery play out in the way they reared their children sucked big time. I and my siblings are in 100% agreement that they should have gotten divorced about 30 years back, and that they and we would all be happier if they had.

Also, I think my marriage would suffer greatly if my husband and I had to suddenly switch to abstinence. Pregnancy is simply not an option, being that I’m not really keen on surgery without anesthesia, which is what happened with my last childbirth. Are we less lifetime committed because we’re happier having sex with contraception than not having sex at all?

Catholic theology is a wonderful theoretical structure, but Catholics have a horrible tendency to forget that it’s a model and “All models are wrong, some models are useful.” When the model and reality conflict, you alter the model, or don’t use it in that instance. Yet most conservative Catholics I’ve met want to toss out reality instead. Too bad it doesn’t work.

Without divorce, I would not be married to my husband; we wouldn’t have our two children (divorce encourages marriage!  And procreation!) Without divorce, my father wouldn’t be married to the extremely nice woman he’s now married to, and my mother wouldn’t be living in rural Washington state writing hiking books (divorce encourages marriage!  And exercise!) Without birth control, my husband and I would, oh, probably have to stick to oral and such, which is fine, but limited.  I’m not entirely sure how that’s supposed to promote marital bonding more than screwing while on the pill, Austin; perhaps you could explain that for us?
Incidentally, having anti-contraception rants pop up on one’s computer has never been proven not to interfere with implantation.  You will simply have to stop writing them until you can clear that up, okay?

MP @ 22,
Seeing as how I have had the seen same exact desplays in Walmart & Target in stores in PA, LA, WA, ID, FL, MA, NH, NY (Upstate & NYC), NJ, & MT,;yeah, other than places where everything is locked up due to shop lifting, I find it shocking.

Oh, my, the naive little ignoramous actually dared to come back.  That is funny.

First, it hasn’t been proven to never prevent implantation. 

By this logic, if you want to be consistent, you should oppose all sexual intercourse between a fertile man and woman.  All.  Because failure to implant is a feature of fertility, happens to basically 100% of women who conceive.  Bodies reject fertilized eggs more than they accept them.  If you believe that a person is dying, then you must, absolutely must, oppose all potentially fertile sexual intercourse.  All. 

Yes, the human race will die out.  But if it’s murder, then these kind of ends-justify-the-means justifications are also immoral.

If you could socially construct sexual relationships as lifetime commitments, there would be less divorce, among other things.

I fail to see why a world of unhappy people who are sorely tempted to kill their spouses to get a shot at freedom is something we should aspire to.

“I am pro-life, and like virtually all pro-life organizations, not to mention the Republican party, I oppose all contraception.  Happy?”

I’m happy that you outed yourself, Austin.

Now, if only every person who is opposed to contraception would come out and admit it.

And if only every person who just can’t stand it that a black guy has been elected President would come out and admit THAT.

If we were all honest about things like this, maybe we could all begin healing.