Missouri Lawmakers Focus on Plan B
Missouri isn’t the best state in which to find yourself unhappily pregnant. But if some lawmakers get their way, many more women will find themselves in such dire straits.
The Kansas City Star reports:
Legislation presented to a House panel last week would classify emergency contraception as an abortion-inducing medication, contrary to the definition used by the Food and Drug Administration.
Leftie sites are sputtering with justified rage since, as many of them have pointed out for the millionth time, emergency contraception is not an abortifacient. It essentially works as a mega dose of birth control - either preventing ovulation, fertilization or a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall.
The bill, should it pass, would also allow pharmacists to abstain (ha) from dispensing Plan B without fear of lawsuits or government regulation.
It seems like this bill won’t pass. Danger averted? Not really.
Here’s the problem: this is the more subtle ‘whittling away’ tactic that anti-choicers have been working on for some years. Knowing that they can’t get abortion outlawed, they’ll settle for 24-hour waiting periods and parental notification. For now. Once people are used to those ideas, they’ll push for more. [It's like what we're doing with civil unions, but terrible.]
But that’s abortion, right? Surely they wouldn’t come after your Ortho-Tri. Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. Getting rid of contraceptives is definitely on the agenda for some of these groups, and they’ll use the same tactics.
All they have to do is get Plan B classified as an abortion-inducing drug in one state. Once that happens, things will start to fall pretty quickly. Plan B is essentially what I said: a mega dose of the pill, minus the estrogen. If Plan B becomes classified as abortion-inducing, any pill containing levonorgestrel (the synthetic progesterone found in many pills, both monophasal and triphasal) will be easy prey.
It’s not a far step from allowing a pharmacist to deny you Plan B because it causes abortion to denying you the pill for the exact same reason.
And they know it.
This is a “First they came…” situation, and if it fails in Missouri, it will be tried elsewhere.
Feministing has info on how you can contact the Missouri Health Care Policy committee chair. He’s a doctor, so hopefully he won’t need a marvelous amount of convincing, but a few emails never hurt.
Links:
Missouri Bill Would Reclassify Morning-After Pill, Protect Pharmacies [Kansas City Star] - Love that headline by the way, poor pharmacies…
Analysis of HB1625 [NARAL]
