Sticking It to Plan B

By Bill Maher

Last month, a federal judge in Brooklyn ordered the FDA to make the morning-after pill available without a prescription. He basically said that the science was in, and it was safer than Motrin, and the only reason it hadn’t been approved in the first place was Jesus politics. Okay, he didn’t say those things but that’s what it came down to.

That’s not going to stop anti-abortion people from making things up about the morning-after pill killing everything it touches, and then eating through the floor like the blood from an alien.
But it made me think about the horrifying warnings in ads for prescription drugs, the ones that always sound at least as bad as the disease. You know, “You may experience dry mouth, and grow a tail and gills. Ask your exorcist.” Here’s the major side effect of not taking Plan B: A foreign body incubates inside you. Then it takes over your life and ruins it.

Here’s Slate putting it in gentler terms:

The reality is that oral contraceptives help prevent a much more serious condition: pregnancy, which brings with it huge medical, emotional, financial, and legal risk. More specifically, the main health concern with oral contraceptives is an increased risk of blood clots, but as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists points out, that risk is “extremely low.” It’s also “significantly lower than the risk of blood clots during pregnancy and the postpartum period.”

The morning-after pill is better for you than pregnancy. So we can debate abortion, but we can’t pretend it’s about some global-warming type mystery about women’s health.