Pro Choice or Right to Life

There is probably just one point on which these two factions agree: that abortions should not be used as a form of birth control (although Pro Choicers, like me, would add "unless all other methods are exhausted).

I don't know anyone Pro Choice who is also pro abortion. The difference, however, is that as pro choice people, we feel that it is the right of the individual in the situation to make (usually) her best choice for her life and the life she's carrying. Pro Life people, however, don't want a woman to have an abortion, but they would (generally, I have spoken with people who are only opposed to abortion but they seem to be - in my own experience - the minority) also prevent a woman from having any other form of birth control. Pro Life groups demonstrate against Planned Parenthood when the overwhelming amount of work PP does is NOT termination of pregnancy but in programs to help a woman maintain good GYN health as well as sexual health education (staying free of disease, getting pregnant when she chooses). For years, I used PP for my yearly GYN checkups because they offered a sliding scale fee and were pretty darned good about making me smarter about my own body.

What brings this up is that I happened again over a Jesse Taylor posting at Pandagon that raises an important point about the morning after pill that too many miss:

Does anybody here know why the morning-after pill has a 72-hour window? Anyone? Well, you see, when the mommy half and the daddy half get together, it's a process called "fertilization". The problem is, however, that unless that fertilized mommy-and-daddy bit is implanted in the mommy's tummy, it can't ever become a baby nine months later. Unless it's implanted, it's a combined bit of regularly produced bodily secretions that in its then-current state cannot develop any further.

By any real standard of pregnancy, you aren't pregnant until you have an embryo in a womb. Which makes the whole debate over the morning-after pill in Illinois skewed. Pharmacists are supposed to be trained scientists. A huge part of that is understanding what drugs do to the body and how the body actually works. This is what gets me about the whole "pharmacists' rights" movement - they're apparently willing to completely manufacture a different reproductive system that affords them moral outrage.

It's not just that they're fighting for the right to deny women legal medical treatment - I could understand that from a moral perspective. It's that they're denying women treatment based on ignorance of how the drugs they dispense work. They don't want to do their jobs because they're bad at them.