Medicine: 'Morning-after' pill doesn't increase unsafe sex

A British study this time:

Answers to the surveys showed that the proportion of women reporting current use of contraception remained unchanged over time. Overall use of emergency contraception also remained the same.

For example, the proportion using emergency contraception once per year was 6.5 percent, 6.3 percent and 5.6 percent during each period. The proportion using emergency contraception more than once was 2.0 percent, 1.5 percent and 1.7 percent.

The only apparent change over time was in the places where women procured emergency contraception. The proportions obtaining the morning-after pill from a pharmacy increased from zero in 2000 to 19.7 percent in 2001 and 32.6 percent in 2002. During the same periods, fewer women obtained emergency contraception from a general practitioner or a family planning clinic.

"The sharp rise in the proportion of women buying emergency hormonal contraception over the counter indicates that many women prefer this way of obtaining it," Marston and her colleagues maintain. Easier access is likely to have prevented more pregnancies, they add.

Of course, no number of well-done studies will convince the rascally right. The most humorous thing is that Plan B is far from a benign treatment. You don't just go out, have your fun, and pop in some pills the next day, and go about your business while a possibly fertilized zygote doesn't implant and gets flushed out in the wash next month. No, plan B is a 24 hour tour-de-nausea. Now, if people think that puking their brains out for a day is perfectly fine everytime they want to have sex, that's their choice, but somehow I don't think most women are so incredibly promiscuous that they'll trade a romp in the hay for a day of HellFlu2000. Of course, for those occasional times when things just go wrong, or a primary source of birth control fails, a day of nausea isn't much compared to nine months of nausea and 24 years of headaches.

But once again, that would require the social right to actually understand what they're talking about, and actually think about someone's life other than their own.