Girls Gone Wild…on EC

In other choice/teen news: make sure to check out The New Republic’s article on all the recent brouhaha surrounding emergency contraception, Morning-After Sickness. Outside of discussing legislative threats, author Jonathan Cohn also takes on the fear of teen sex that seems to be behind much of the opposition to EC:
The other serious argument against Plan B is that it will increase risky sexual activity by young people. But peer-reviewed studies published in mainstream medical publications (like one just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) have repeatedly found no such link. Of course, conservatives argue that making emergency contraception available sends a broader cultural message about the acceptability of premarital sex…
…When conservatives talk about Plan B, they conjure up images of lust-crazed college girls engaging in one-night stands, then reaching over empty beer bottles to grab their supersized Plan B jars. But the one group to whom emergency contraception would make the greatest difference is rape victims. According to Trussell, who studied statistics from 1998, about 22,000 of the 25,000 women who became pregnant from rape could have prevented pregnancy with emergency contraception. Unfortunately, the new federal hospital guidelines for rape treatment released in January mysteriously omitted Plan B, even though a previous draft had included it. In Colorado, conservatives have fought efforts to impose a guideline that includes emergency contraceptives…
I’m glad that Cohn points out that women who are suffering most because of the lack of EC availability are rape victims and not crazy spring breakers, as the conservatives would have us believe. But don’t crazy spring breakers deserve EC, too? By focusing on victims of sexual assault as the primary users of emergency contraception are we somehow bolstering the argument that “irresponsible” teen girls shouldn’t have access to it? Just putting it out there…