by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
Today is the annual Back Up Your Birth Control Day – so let’s celebrate emergency contraception! As you may know, Princeton has one of the premier researchers on the subject right here, Professor James Trussell, who is the director of the Office for Population Research, which you may know because of its fabulous EC informational website.
We’ve seen some great advances for emergency contraception access – most recently, EC became available for servicewomen at military health facilities all over the world. But, as the Center for Reproductive Rights points out, it’s still not as easy to get as it should be (there are age restrictions, and women have to show ID at the counter, which is unnecessary and embarrassing) – something that the FDA has been urged to consider and which it has oh-so-graciously ignored. This is not to mention the fact that anyone who has purchased EC and found it to be extremely expensive will understand the desperate need for a generic version. Watch this great video and tell the FDA to get a move on here!
H/t to Feministing for the video.
When the government mandated seatbelts, the idea was that this would reduce traffic deaths. But what happened was that when the consequences of an accident became less severe, people began to drive more recklessly.
I hope you don’t forget to celebrate reckless sexual behavior as you celebrate “emergency contraception” today. Who needs a Plan A when you have Plan B? Might want to think about this before you advocate putting emergency contraception in the hands of reckless and short-sighted teenagers.
By that logic, Tristan, we should stop researching cures for heart disease because people will just eat more fattening foods. We should stop scientific and technological research in general, probably, because people will just get lazier and lazier!
Sure, people may choose to use EC and be more “reckless” sexually (you should be more clear about what you mean here). But EC is supposed to be used as a back-up defense (hence “emergency” contraception), just as seat belts are helpful in the case of accidents.
Take reckless sex to mean sex without a condom. Further stipulate that sex without a condom has a dramatically higher chance, compared to sex with a condom, of bringing about two bad consequences: STDs and unintended pregnancies. EC addresses the latter of these, and by reducing the risks associated with reckless sex makes risky sex more attractive as a possible course of action.
Now you suggest that a medical technology that eliminated the possibility of heart disease as a result of eating fattening foods would, by my logic, encourage people to eat fattening foods (as if we needed any more encouragement) by reducing the possible negative consequences. I agree. And you assume that there are other bad effects of eating fattening foods besides increasing the risk of heart disease. I agree. I would even speculate that the increasing sophistication and cheapness of such technology has in fact played no small role in the obesity “epidemic”. (Thankfully, politicians have chosen to make a stand against obesity by stemming the tide of such innovation.)
The distinction is that heart disease is something people suffer from right now, as a result of the life they’ve been living for many years. This is important for several reasons. First, people already are at risk as a result of their prior actions and new medications will improve their lives immediately. Unintended pregnancy and death, on the other hand, are not chronic conditions. Second, because the relevant action i.e. eating badly, occurs over a long period of time, with no particular meal likely to do much harm, any incentive that deals with the cumulative impact is unlikely to translate into an incentive in each particular instance of eating badly. The deed is now, the harm, if it comes at all, will come much later. Obviously this is not true with reckless sex and reckless driving. The deterrent effect is even weaker when the incentive is the mere prospect of some marginal improvement in some unknown technology that might happen at some point in the future. It does not have the immediacy of seatbelts or EC. Furthermore, seatbelts and EC create a feeling of security and certainty: that I will definitely be protected if…. This is not true with medical technology of the sort you described.
That EC is “supposed” to be used as a “back-up defense” has nothing to do with its actual use and its actual effects.
Re. Tristan: “When the government mandated seatbelts, the idea was that this would reduce traffic deaths. But what happened was that when the consequences of an accident became less severe, people began to drive more recklessly.”
Can you provide any statistical evidence to suggest that this is true? All the numbers I’ve seen say that traffic fatalities in the US are at an all-time low.
Just because an insurance mechanism (e.g., seat belts, Plan B, auto insurance, health insurance) has the potential to induce a moral hazard doesn’t mean that it always does. And even if it does, improvements to overall safety and wellbeing can still outweigh the moral hazard.
The intro to this article summarizes some of the research in this area and gives some empirical backing to the compensating behavior hypothesis: http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=LrTDGnWhdCJVQH9BYLQpKcKnVnF3TfQs7mjHkV5Y8h8hfQbQc5D2!596687982!-644532755?docId=96524753 .
This article itself argues that people who are very risk-averse do not really change their behavior whether they have seatbelts or not, which makes sense, and seems to match up with the plan B issue. Furthermore, the adverse effects of seat-belt use will not be seen most clearly in traffic fatalities–that would be analogous to saying that the number of accidental pregnancies is lower among people using plan B. It’s just the point of the device. Where it shows up is in pedestrian injuries and in total amount of damage to, for example, the body of the car itself–i.e., damage to things or people that are not protected by seatbelts. Similarly, the harm that I claim results from the use of Plan B is (to take the best example) the body, in the form of STDs–something that Plan B does not protect against. So as you might expect, the harm of the preventative measure is not to the thing that the measure directly protects (the driver’s life), but to things affected by the behavior itself (driving), like the lives and health of pedestrians.