Is AAP’s “routine Plan B Rx for teen girls” step too far for Obama?
During Thanksgiving week the American Academy of Pediatrics announced its recommendation that “morning after” prescriptions be issued to adolescent girls as a matter of course….
This approach, besides being deeply insulting to the human dignity of adolescents, exposes the reality that when we talk about sex these days, we all too often put good health and good sense aside, despite the rhetoric about “women’s health.” (Even the pediatricians do!) “Women’s health” routinely assumes promiscuity, whatever the age, and despite the risks to the girl’s or woman’s physical and mental health….
The AAP recommendation, as it happens, might be a step too far for even the Obama administration. Earlier this year, when the Department of Health and Human Services overruled a Federal Drug Administration recommendation that Plan B be made available over the counter, none other than Barack Obama declared: “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine…. The reason Kathleen [Sebelius] made this decision was she could not be confident that a ten-year-old or an eleven-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect.”
Could we actually take a few steps back together here? Toward something healthier than a wholesale surrender of innocence, medical knowledge, and common sense?
~ Kathryn Jean Lopez (pictured), National Review Online, December 3
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.