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Stalking votes with over-the-counter vetoes

Rousseau is a voluntary exile from professional philosophy, where having to talk metaphysics eventually became unbearably irritating. He now spends his time trying to arrest the rapid decline in common sense exhibited by his species, both through teaching critical thinking and business ethics at the University of Cape Town, and through activities aimed at eliminating the influence of religious ideology in public policy. When not being absurdly serious, he’s one of those left-wing sorts who enjoys red wine, and he is alleged to be able to cook a mean Bistecca Fiorentine.

Overturning the FDA’s recommendation to allow Plan B – the morning-after pill - to be sold over-the-counter plays politics with the health of future generations of voters, all for the sake of unlikely gains in sympathy with this generation.

It seems the man who said: “We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost” in his inaugural address has left the building. The building is the White House and the man is President Barack Obama.

We can hope his absence is temporary, intended merely to provide for potential excursions into the hearts and minds of some Republican or undecided voters. But his endorsement of the decision to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to allow “Plan B” (also known as the “morning-after pill”) to be sold to teenagers over the counter rather than by prescription seems little more than a violation of that pledge to respect science.

Instead, he’s kowtowing to moral conservatives, alarmed at the prospect of their teenage daughters having sex. Seeing as many of these conservatives are equally fond of taking life guidance from religious texts, this is also another step back from the reassuring name-checking of “non-believers” in that same inaugural address.

Plan B is not an abortion pill, nor is it related to RU-486. The 1.5mg of progesterone it contains helps prevent ovulation and makes the lining of the uterus less hospitable to a fertilised egg. As The New York Times rightly points out, “this latter effect — shared by all hormonal and intrauterine contraceptives — makes it anathema to anti-abortion activists”.

Anti-abortion activists are perhaps unlikely to be voting for Obama in large numbers in any case. This is, after all, the President who shortly after taking office lifted the Reagan ban, then the George W Bush ban on federal funding for international health groups who support abortion rights. The ban was briefly reversed by Clinton before being reinstated by Bush.

Then again, the man who campaigned as a pro-choice candidate, did later sign an executive order ensuring the healthcare law of 2010 would maintain the ban on federal money being used to pay for abortions (except in cases of rape or incest). So while it’s perhaps the case that his stance on abortion ends up evening out in terms of effects at the ballot box, this particular decision nevertheless stands out for its sacrifice of principles for potential political gain.

I say this for two reasons: firstly, this is the only time an American secretary of health and human services has overruled an FDA recommendation. While the secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, made the decision, it’s clear it was endorsed by Obama himself.

A White House statement last week said: “The reason Kathleen made this decision is that she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going to a drug store should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could have an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

With 11 months to go before the US presidential elections, the unprecedented overturning of an FDA recommendation is difficult to understand as anything other than an attempt to reassure conservatives that Obama is sympathetic to that nebulous concept of “family values” (which, like the term “neo-liberal”, seems in cases like these to mean whatever you do or don’t like about what the other guy is doing).

Secondly, the FDA recommendation appears to be well thought-through, making a principled objection to allowing over-the-counter sales of Plan B difficult to sustain. The need for drugs like this is clear in that the US has the highest teen pregnancy rates of any industrialised nation. Plan B is already available without prescription for women over 17, and by prescription for younger teens.

It should of course go without saying that Plan B does not induce teenagers to desire sex – many or most of them have that desire in any case and would already have acted on it if they were trying to get hold of the drug in question. Furthermore, while making the uterus less hospitable to a fertilised egg could induce an abortion, the pill only lowers your chances of becoming pregnant to one in 40 (compared to one in 20 for unprotected intercourse), making it implausible that teens will use Plan B as licence for spontaneous orgies.

Sibelius’s claim is that we can’t be sure whether Plan B has harmful effects on 11 year olds, who can of course also fall pregnant. And naturally there might be risks. But in this case, we’re speaking of a drug which the FDA’s panel of experts regards as safe, and of which the assistant dean at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy says: “Very few medications are this simple, convenient and safe”.

A double-standard, informed by a moral panic around teens having sex, is clearly at play. Former FDA assistant commissioner Susan Wood points out that drugs like acetaminophen (an analgesic found in Tylenol and many other over-the-counter medicines) can be fatal, but had not been specifically studied for effects on 11 year olds, despite being potentially far more dangerous to them. She asks, “Why are contraceptives singled out every single time when they’re actually far safer than what’s already out there?”

We can also ask whether pregnancy itself is riskier to an 11 year old than Plan B. We can ask whether any of the people who might be heartened by this overrule, and Obama’s endorsement of it, were ever likely to vote for him in any case. More pertinently, we can perhaps ask what happened to the man who promised to restore science to its rightful place, and how did he become the man who seems willing to play politics with the bodies of the next generation of voters, for the sake of hypothetical sympathies from the current generation? DM


Read more:

  • Obama administration plays politics with the bodies of women and girls, Writing Rights;
  • Obama administration overrules FDA, prohibits unrestrained access to contraception, Why Evolution is True;
  • Plan to Widen Availability of Morning-After Pill Is Rejected, The New York Times.
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