Plan B

Plan B, also known as "the morning-after pill," will now be made available without a prescription to women 17 and older:

The federal government said yesterday that it will allow the sale of the morning-after pill Plan B without a prescription to women as young as 17, a move that would make the contraceptive available to minors for the first time without a doctor's order.

Heh. I said: "women 17 and older." The WaPo said: "women as young as 17." That's an interesting difference in perspective, isn't it? Veritable chasms of meaning can be built into such small linguistic variation!

It's also fascinating that the WaPo notes that 17-year-old women are minors, even though that's largely moot, given that the age of consent is 17 or younger in all but 8 states. Only in the fucked-up paradigm where young women are allowed to have sex but not allowed to decide for themselves what to do if a pregnancy results is the fact that Plan B is being made available to "minors" even relevant. In a sane world, dictated by logic, and in which women are smart enough to make their own decisions about both sex and its potential consequences, it's not worth mentioning.

U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman in New York instructed the [FDA] on March 23 to make Plan B available to 17-year-olds within 30 days and to reconsider other restrictions, including whether the drug could be made available to all ages.

Looks like Judge Korman is interested in living in a sane world, rather than that fucked-up paradigm. How refreshing!

Advocacy groups and conservative members of Congress … questioned the drug's safety and argued that wider availability could encourage sexual activity and make it easier for men to have sex with underage girls.

Honestly, I don't even want to try to understand a mind that opposes emergency contraception on the basis of a fervent belief that the only thing stopping men from "having sex" with underage girls is the possibility of irrefutable evidence in the form of a pregnancy.

And it's feminists who are called the man-haters.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this link.]