I’ll insert my disclaimer here: I am pro-life. I would like to see abortion become as rare as possible. As a consequence, I am a strong supporter of Plan B and have been for some time. I think every woman/girl who is physically able to get pregnant, whether she’s my age or the age of my 12-year-old niece, should have Plan B in her dresser drawer for emergencies. (A contraceptive emergency is everything from rape and incest to consensual sex without contraception.)

Plan B is not an abortifacient, nor is it dangerous. The FDA has established that. Plan B is, however, a simple, painless way to prevent an unwanted/unplanned pregnancy from happening and at about $40 per pill, affordable. It can also be purchased at any pharmacy or chain drugstore. Plan B is also about as private a means of preventing a pregnancy (other than regular, consistent use of contraception) as possible. It is ideal for women and girls who feel too shamed, embarrassed or frightened by an unwanted/unplanned pregnancy to deal with decision-making until it is too late for an abortion.

Abortion is complicated, harder and harder to get, especially for poor women, teenagers and women living in rural areas, as well as painful and expensive. Plus, abortion does kill the fetus. With Plan B there never is a fetus because fertilization never takes place.

Every woman in America should be disturbed by these political actions last week. As a woman who has yet to go into menopause but who definitely has no interest in having a child in middle age, I know I would not want to be faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Nine years ago, before Plan B was available, I was raped. Fortunately, I was not among the percentage of rape victims who is impregnated by her rapist. But had I been, I would have had to make the awful choice between carrying the child of my rapist or having an abortion. Many women face these choices every day. The option of Plan B is a tremendous relief.

Pennsylvania bill SB732 was ostensibly in response to the horrific scene uncovered earlier this year at the West Philadelphia Women’s Clinic run by Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his wife. Gosnell was operating outside pretty much every law in place for free-standing ) abortion clinics (that is, a clinic not associated with a hospital, Planned Parenthood or other oversight agency). He was allegedly dispensing drugs illegally and he was allegedly performing third-trimester abortions, which are not legal outside a surgical center or hospital setting because they require that a woman go into actual labor and the complications are manifold and the woman’s health is at tremendous risk.

He was also committing murder. Gosnell is charged with killing seven live infants by snipping their spinal cords and brain stems with scissors. Bodies of infants and fetuses were found in storage at the clinic, which was also filthy. Conditions at the clinic came to light when a woman died from complications of a third-trimester abortion. Gosnell is also charged with her murder. No one can argue that the Gosnell clinic was serving women. Gosnell made money off desperate women, like the one he is accused of killing, who was an immigrant who had tried to get a late-stage abortion in Maryland before coming to Philadelphia.

SB 732 places new licensing and other restrictions on independent clinics that are supposed to protect women from predatory health care providers like Gosnell. But if the Department of Health had been performing regular inspections as required by already existing laws, the Gosnell clinic would likely have been closed down before any of the eight murders attributed to Gosnell were perpetrated.

SB 732 is unnecessary. What is necessary is having health inspectors do the required checks on all health clinics, including those that primarily perform abortions, to make sure that patients are getting the appropriate standard of care in a safe, clean, antiseptic environment with trained personnel. (The Grand Jury found that among other illegalities, the Gosnells’ clinic was staffed predominately with high-school students who often administered anesthesia.)

Pennsylvania already has the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. In addition, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, only ten counties (out of 67) have abortion providers and there are only 20 independent clinics in the state. Which means poor women–and Pennsylvania is largely rural and has a significant poverty demographic–are the least likely to be able to access abortions.

Which brings me back to President Obama’s anti-science/election year decision last week to over-rule the FDA on making Plan B available to girls under 18. In supporting HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s decision to go against the FDA’s ruling, Obama noted that he didn’t want his daughters finding Plan B “next to the bubble gum and band aids.” This is the kind of rabid, anti-science statement one would expect from someone on the extremist right, not a Democratic president who campaigned on standing for science.

First, Plan B won’t be anywhere near “bubble gum and band aids” in any pharmacy. And the Malia and Sasha Obama are not likely to be the girls who would need it. But if the president ever left his insular meet and greets to actually come to the inner city like my neighborhood, or the poverty-stricken rural areas of America, like Mississippi where teen pregnancy is pandemic, he would know why Plan B is so important and why its availability to girls between 12 and 17 is essential.

Fifteen years ago I taught in a program at Lutheran Settlement for pregnant teenagers. The girls took GED and other high school equivalency courses in the morning and in the afternoons they were taught life skills. My students ranged in age from 12 to 17. The 17-year-old was on her third baby. The 12-year-old implied in several talks with me that the father of her baby was her own father. Statistics show that the women most likely to seek out a late-stage abortion for reasons that are non-medical are teenagers. Plan B might not be a panacea that will stop all teen pregnancies, but it is one more stop-gap and also one more safe way to prevent abortions.

In the debate over who controls women’s bodies, women lose. President Obama’s daughters may be in the age range covered by the FDA’s ruling, but they are not the demographic that needs access to Plan B. When Sebelius and Obama both say that parents need to be involved in the decisions regarding their child’s health, they ignore the realities: there are many drugs available over the counter to kids that actually are dangerous, including Tylenol, aspirin and cough medicines. Yet Sebelius and Obama are not suggesting restricting those to people over 18. What’s more, when these two upper-middle-class parents talk about parental involvement, they pre-suppose two things: first, that a teenage girl’s parents care enough to be involved and second, that a teenage girl’s parents aren’t part of the reason she’s had unprotected sex.

 One in four girls is a victim of sexual abuse before she turns 18. Many of the perpetrators are family members. Shouldn’t she be allowed access to Plan B rather than being forced to bear the child of one of her male relatives? The Plan B decision was 100 percent political, as was the 155-44 vote passing SB 732. These were not decisions based on science or protecting women, but politically motivated dictates meant to interfere in women’s personal lives and make a statement to voters in an election year.

Here’s what politicians on both sides of the aisle should be considering rather than votes: No woman wants to have an abortion. Women who choose abortion do so because they feel it is their only option, and so it should be accessible and safe. But Plan B also gives many women a safe, inexpensive, reliable and accessible alternative that is also guilt-free.

Every pro-life advocate should be a huge supporter of Plan B. I’d be handing Plan B (and condoms) out in the schools, if I could. But if Plan B is not an option because too much time has passed, then abortion–which has been legal for nearly 40 years–should be made as accessible as possible. Women don’t make the abortion decision lightly. Making abortion difficult for them only adds an unnecessary burden of shame and guilt. Meanwhile, making first trimester abortions–which are reasonably safe and in which the fetus is not viable–accessible, women are less likely to be forced to have second or even third-trimester abortions where there is a viable fetus and there is also great risk to the health of the woman. Making early abortions more difficult to obtain only means there will be more late-term abortions. If a woman wants an abortion, she will find one–if not at a real clinic, then at the kind of over-priced butcher shop Gosnell was running.

As for Plan B, Obama implies that kids under 18 are not having sex. He seems to forget his own mother was a pregnant teenager before she married his father–and that was 50 years ago when teen pregnancy was considered shameful, rather than the commonplace it has become in 2011.

Yet common as it now is, what we know about teen pregnancy is all bad. Girls who have babies before they are 20 are the least likely to finish school, get a secondary education or be able to find a good job. One baby before a girl is 20 is almost always followed by a second. Children of teenage mothers are at risk physically from health issues, but are also then twice as likely to drop out of school and/or become teen parents themselves.

Teen pregnancy benefits no one. And as so-called abstinence programs have proven, teens will have sex, regardless of what parents or peers say. While the President believes his daughters will never be those girls, he really can’t know for sure. Over 70 percent of girls have had sex by the time they turn 17.

Last week was a bad week for women with these two decisions. And neither will lead where the politicians involved want. Obama’s anti-science rhetoric won’t stop teenagers from having sex, but it may mean that some will be forced to have abortions and others babies, rather than have access to a simple pill. The Pennsylvania legislature can sit back smugly, noting that they are saving women’s lives, but the artificial restrictions it has placed on abortion clinics is likely to create more Gosnells, not punish them. Extremist, anti-science politics–whether purveyed by a Republicans or Democrats–benefit no one. But they have the potential to hurt millions of women. Turning back the reproductive clock is impossible but the results of these continued efforts will be nothing less than catastrophic.

 follow me on Twitter @VABVOX

The best way to deal with disease and public health crises like epidemics and pandemics is prophylactically–an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. Which is why vaccinations are one of the best tools we have in preventing illnesses from spreading.

Perhaps it was the eight years of the flat-earth, creationist, global-warming-is-a-myth Bush Administration that turned anti-science craziness into accepted/acceptable behavior. Like most progressives, I prefer to adjudicate the reactionary behaviors of the nation to the right–particularly the extremist right.

The problem with the anti-vaccine movement, however, is it’s equal opportunity anti-science craziness. When else can you hear two people as seemingly on opposite ends of the political spectrum as Bill Maher and Glenn Beck being proponents of the same lunatic attitudes? When the topic of vaccines is raised.

Bill Maher has told his audiences for weeks now that anyone who gets the H1N1 vaccine is “an idiot” while Glenn Beck has posited that no one really needs the vaccine because the disease isn’t that bad. Beck’s suggested “chicken pox parties” (this is where a bunch of sick people get healthy people in the room with them and make them sick, too, thereby–allegedly–innoculating them against a disease). Both men have implied that the vaccination “frenzy” as both have termed it is another attempt by government to interfere in our lives.

What utter anti-science nonsense. As HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted today on ABC news, she prefers to get her science from scientists.

I could not agree more.

What makes everyone think they are scientists now? When, for example, did we decide it was okay to give people like Beck, Maher and former MTV model/host Jenny McCarthy medical credentials?

Maher is a member of The Reason Society which implies something more than just an anti-religious group since the word “reason” is in the title.

Meanwhile, Beck dropped out of Yale after one semester. McCarthy, who claims all vaccines cause autism–a rumor/fixation that has been soundly debunked by science–has written a book about how chelation therapy cures autism (it doesn’t) and has toured the U.S. and other countries telling women not to vaccinate their children.

The major proponents of the anti-science movement which has fixated on vaccines (for now) are not the usual suspects as Maher’s inclusion in this grouping suggests. In fact, they are largely upper-middle-class and well-educated white people who truly believe that vaccines will harm their children. Why they believe a former Playboy model over scientists is inexplicable, but irrationality always is.

The majority of deaths currently from H1N1 have been in children under 16. Unlike most influenza strains which hit the elderly and immuno-compromised most directly, this one mostly impacts children. The current medical theory for this is that it’s a new virus and thus children haven’t yet been exposed to the strains within the strain that is H1N1. They have no immunity. Unless they get the vaccine. 

The major thing separating the developed world and the developing world is medicine and science. Early vaccinations  prevent diseases that used to kill upwards of a third of all children before they turned five–measles, mumps, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus–these diseases killed otherwise healthy children on a regular basis. Smallpox has been virtually eradicated in the world through vaccinations. So has polio.

For more than a decade scientists have been working intensively to find vaccines for HIV/AIDS and malaria–diseases that kill millions worldwide. Why? Because we know emperically that vaccines are our best defense against the kind of epidemic/pandemic scourges that have, at different points in historical time, wiped out large portions of the planet.

In any given year influenza kills about 36,000 in the U.S. We don’t usually hear about this because the strains of flu that we have become used to aren’t new and the majority of deaths are among those in already compromised health, particularly the elderly. Why we are hearing so much about H1N1 is because this strain is disproportionately impacting young, healthy people and pregnant women. Several pregnant women have died from the virus.  

Those pundits who are touting the anti-science perspective on vaccines are all themselves vaccinated. And because they were vaccinated, they have lived well into middle age–only to tell others not to be vaccinated.

But it’s not just among celebrities that the anti-science/anti-vaccine movement has gained traction. New vaccines for meningitis and for HPV have met with vociferous response from parents and religious leaders, many of whom protest these vaccines on moral and religious grounds.

The HPV vaccine prevents human papilloma virus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. HPV has also been implicated in other cancers. The optimal time for vaccination is in prepubescence, before either girls or boys (the CDC now recommends HPV vaccination for boys as well as girls) become sexually active, since HPV is most commonly transmitted through sexual activity.

While it’s difficult for those of us who are not anti-science to imagine anyone not wanting to protect their children from potential cancer, the argument against the HPV vaccine is that it “promotes sexual activity” by giving kids permission to have sex.

Sound insane? It is. HPV vaccine guards against cancer.  

According to the CDC:

Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and another 6.2 million people become newly infected each year. At least 50% of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives.

HPV is commonly linked to cervical cancer, but it is also the main cause of seven other cancers, including anal cancer in women and men and penile cancer.

The reasons for not getting children vaccinated against meningitis are even more sketchy. Meningitis is commonly transmitted in close quarters like college dorms by close personal contact and kissing. It is most often a disease of people under 25.

Yet meningitis is a proven killer. An infection of the membranes that protect the brain and spine, meningitis can kill–and does. Often those infected are dead within 24 hours while others can end up with gangrene and lose limbs. In January 1,900 children were killed in Ethopia  in a meningitis outbreak. In the U.S. the disease usually will effect one or two  kids in an elementary or high  school, as many as ten at a college, but with vaccination the fear of these outbreaks would be minimal.

The anti-science argument is that there are two sides to vaccines and that the pro-vaccine side has been overstated. How can you prove a negative, argues one anti-vaccine website for parents which also argues that “a few childhood infections” are no big deal. But no one is vaccinated against diseases that are “childhood infections.” Vaccines are developed for diseases that have become or have the potential to become public health emergencies, disease that either kill or do significant permanent damage.  

Suggesting that those who are anti-vaccine have as valid an argument as the science  of vaccines is like presenting a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust denier and saying they each have valid points. And yet there are magazines like “Balanced Living” that give point-by-point refutations on how vaccines are unnecessary and themselves more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.

Wrong.

These are people who never saw a child with diptheria or measels because those diseases have largely been eradicated in the developed world–through vaccines. But diptheria previously killed 15 percent of the children who contracted it and measels killed as many as 30 percent of those who were infected. We all know how devastating polio was on the population. Many children and adults died while others–like President Franklin Roosevelt–were permanently disabled.  

Are there problems with vaccines? Occasional, just as there are with all medications. Some of those adverse effects can be serious, but they are also few. In 10 million vaccinations for H1N1 there has not been a single serious adverse incident past sore injection sites or runny noses from inhalation vaccines, while just last week there were 22 deaths of children from H1N1. 

The perils of not vaccinating are well-documented. Every year we hear of evangelical churches that disallow the children of their memberships vaccinations and the subsequent outbreaks of measels that kill a handful of children.

Here’s what’s so outrageous:  The anti-science lobby (and those celebrities who support it) in the U.S. (Europe seems not to have fallen under the spell of  this voodoo)has well-educated parents risking their childrens’ lives–and the lives of their childrens’ peers–by refusing/refuting science.  Yet what is preventing children in the developing world from living into adulthood is lack of vaccines and other medical care which these American parents eschew.

Here’s an increasingly consistent scenario: Upper middle class parents don’t vaccinate their child against measels. The child gets–fortunately–a mild case and recovers with no lasting impairment. But then while that child is sick–and measels is a highly communicable disease—other children too young to be vaccinated are exposed to this sick child and those children get very sick and possibly die.

That’s how epidemics start. Exposure without immunity. Vaccines provide immunity. Just like science provides immunity to irrationality.

I expect anti-science lunacy from someone like Glenn Beck. But Bill Maher knows better. The same guy who did “Religulous” seems to have his own streak of irrationality.

Fear of vaccines is like fear of spiders–it’s irrational and it harkens back to our most superstitous roots. Promoting or fueling that fear isn’t just an alternative viewpoint–it’s dangerous. It may not be the same as holding a gun to someone’s head, but the peril of healthy adults who grew up vaccinated arguing that their children and other people’s children should not be vaccinated is that children will die when they don’t have to. And if that’s not a crime, it should be.—VAB