But preventing religious conservatives from slut shaming women for having sex is an ASSAULT on their religious freedoms..
Why do you hate FREEDOM Cienna?

I'll say it again,

This is the reason I'm not just atheist, but anti-theist. Christians complain that atheists are aggressive and pushing their atheist agendas and why can't they just mind their own business.

This is why I'm not going to mind my own business. I would gladly leave them alone if they would leave me alone. But they don't. They tell people its your choice if you want to believe or not, and when you tell them you don't believe they turn around and demand it.

Fuck religion.

Compromise on this means that next time you'll be compromising on the right to contraception at all. You'll end up having to explain why we shouldn't make all sex outside of Christian marriage illegal, which is what they want.

BTW, Obama & Co., just appealed the court's decision. Obviously, they've got a heavy dose of the cray-cray.

Tarico is correct. There is no valid medical reason a 15 year old (or any girl) should be asked to produce ID. A 15 year old isn't required to produce ID to buy aspirin. There is no reason for this barrier except right-wing slut shaming.

Fuck that.

Do you phonies live in Washington State, or is this whole blog operated out of boiler room in DNC headquarters?

In my state, Washington, you can get a non driver ID.

http://www.dmv.com/wa/washington/apply-i…

A couple of things:

(1) It's the US Food and Drug Administration, not the Federal Drug Administration.

(2) The proposed régime is in violation of Judge Korman's order, which mandated *no* age restrictions. It's not a "compromise"; it's contempt of court.

@2 me too
@7, yeah, what's with that? Isn't the no-age-restriction order still going to take effect in a couple of weeks? What is even the point of this ruling?

If you're old enough to get pregnant, you're probably old enough to be trusted with the decisions over what your uterus is up to.

@6, Sure, it is possible for younger girls to get non-driver ID. But the practical reality is that there is almost no reason for any kid under 16 to need ID, so almost none of them do. I did some work in a high school last year. I can guarantee you that less than 1 in 100 kids under 16 had any sort of ID other than their school ID, which no pharmacy would accept, and maybe a SSN.

So if you're a girl under 16, and you find yourself needing emergency contraceptive, you don't have time to apply for a non-driver ID. Plan B works best if taken immediately.

When a women or teen needs emergency contraception she typically is in a situation she would rather not publicize.

Honestly, this is kind of a BS excuse. I remember going to the drug store to buy condoms when I first became sexually active. And yeah, it was a bit intimidating and embarrassing. But I got over it. In the same way, I've had to get over talking openly about my HIV status with potential partners. And you know what? I got over that too.

If I can deal with the stigma that HIV carries, I think whatever minor amount of personal discomfort that comes with producing ID when you're buying contraception can be dealt with. Frankly, if you're such a shrinking violet that you're terrified to pull out a driver's license (just like you do to buy cigarettes, or beer, or marijuana now) then you probably have no business having sex anyways.

And please, for the love of pete can we agree that some things, like contraception, just like drugs and guns and alcohol and driving and voting and a whole host of other adult activities are not necessarily appropriate for children and teens to be procuring on their own? And if there is some kind of reasonable age limit (and 15 strikes me as eminently reasonable), then ID requirements to enforce that provision seem reasonable too.

The one case where I can see an exception is in the case of rape. But in that case, I would hope that any woman in that situation would be finding someone, anyone, to help her out. And regardless of whether that person is a friend, family member, roommate, boyfriend/girlfriend, case worker or stranger on the street, they should be more than willing to help find contraception.

@9 I think the point may be that at certain ages where girls (yes, girls) are capable of becoming pregnant, they most certainly aren't old enough to be trusted to make good decisions.

I would challenge everyone here to look back at the person they were when they were 13 and seriously tell me that they were capable at that age of making good decisions, especially regarding relationships and sex.

By definition, kids (yes, kids) that age are walking catalogs of bad decisions; this is precisely why they need responsible parents and other adults to take care of them and help them.

@11- Kids don't need to produce ID to have sex, why on earth should they have to produce an ID to acquire birth control? I have a young daughter, I want exactly zero barriers between her and birth control

@14 is exactly right. If the kids don't need a "fucking license" then there should be no ID requirements for any form of OTC contraception, including Plan B.

Well, there are other potential consequences to engaging in sex besides pregnancy. And there are a lot of ways kids might be hurt if they make the decision to have sex that contraception won't fix.

I'm frankly pretty flabbergasted that there are actual parents here who seem to think nothing of their thirteen year old sons and daughters getting into that kind of behavior.

Guess it just goes to show how unhip and not cool this old fart is. I mean, is raising your kids to act like the guests on the Maury Povich show (but oh yes, with birth control, so it's OK) seriously where we are now?

Geez. Thank Dog I don't have any kids of my own. I'm not really sure I'd want them hanging around in that kind of environment. I'd always thought that the homeschoolers were overreacting hysterically. But maybe they're actually right.

Corydon, you realize you sound like a total judgmental asshole, right?

What @10 said.

Thanks for posting this, Cienna, although I'm guessing it's gotten lost in the hoopla of the May Day riots. I've been seriously disappointed with Obama and his administration over this. The linked article is right. It is bullcrap. It just goes to show that Obama's supposed liberalism always comes from the angle of a political calculation. (This goes for gay marriage.) My guess is that he doesn't want to be tarred as the president who sanctioned free sex for middle schoolers. That's ridiculous, of course. There isn't an epidemic of middle school kids having sex and easy access to Plan B won't open any floodgates. (People who make this argument have forgotten what it was like to be that age.) Obama should realize that the right will always blame him regardless and just do right by the people, but he's too cautious, and he's not as progressive as conservatives love to say.

@17, maybe that's what he sounds like to you, but to me he sounds absolutely, totally, 100% correct. Get a little bit of wisdom and experience under your belt and maybe you'll get there too.

@17, 19 Is it your line of reason that by making contraception less available to teens, that they will be less likely to engage in sex, consensual or nonconsensual?

So, just put the stuff on a really really high shelf.
Good compromise?

@20 Better idea. Don't let teens have access to personal hygene products. No one wants to shag a stinky.

@20 You meant @16 not @17.

@1 - couldn't put it any better.

The missus (a lefty MD) and I had a debate about this and she is in agreement with the admin, while I am rooting for the judge - she is also an atheist and is a strong supporter of reproductive rights. Based on her experiences as an Americorp volunteer before and then in the clinical setting during her medical education, her take was: some substantial plurality women (girls) do in fact match the stereotypes: repeated/frequent use of abortion as contraception and willingness to engage in riskier behavior if there's a backup plan. In her reasoning this leads to greater net public health harm because of the increase in risky behaviors by non-adults.

I don't buy this myself - the net damage caused to the much larger number of adult women forced to deal with these impediments to access is substantially larger than any increase in risk-taking behavior by teenage girls aware of the easier access to Plan-B. And that assumes you even buy the notion that there is that much rational analysis taking place on the part of teenage girls - I'd argue that if the are rational enough - in the heat of the moment! - to weigh the consequences of unprotected sex, they are rational enough to make sure they've got a condom. I think the missus is making a fundamental error of over-extrapolating from the personal (she is a rational woman with good impulse control).

I was unsurprised by the administration's stance leading up to the election, but I am pretty shocked that they are fighting it after the election, particularly when they've got a court ruling to let them off the hook politically. Then I think of the missus and the fact that our POTUS has two girls...and it occurs to me that a great many people think certain things are fine for other people to do, but what gets done at home is not. I also think a lot of people really do feel the harm in "just showing an ID" is non-existant.

I haven't read the scientific data presented to the court, but does it include any kind of analysis of the various harms? The shocking, edge-case anecdotal (eg, the 13 year old girl who is repeatedly abused by her older relative, for example) is probably much much less frequent than the 19 year old college student who's denied access by a bigoted pharmacist.

While I agree with Corydon and 52-80 (I'm actually 54-46 myself) that teens are frequently walking definitions of bad judgment (yes, I do remember myself at that age) or at the very least, momentary risky behavior, and I don't believe it's completely hunky-dory for 13 - 14 year olds having sex, having been a 14 year old who had sex with another 14 year old, I am not in denial about the fact it will happen, and @20 asks the right question: do you think limiting access to contraception will prevent sex due to pregnancy risk? Cause (I'm lookin' at you mr. older-and-wiser 52-80) if you believe that nonsense, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell you. Your reasoning is flawed because it's circular: kids shouldn't have sex because they can't be trusted to make sensible choices but we can rely on rational behavior to keep them from having sex. You're just in denial.

The answer is to do your best to teach your kids to be responsible and happy in general, and educate them thoroughly about how sex works, and then like @14 have zero barriers to the tools needed to act responsibly.

@23- Also, I don't know if there is any system in place to identify the 13 year old repeatedly abused. So the cashier at the pharmacy refuses to sell to her- does she automatically get shuffled to a pharmacist who is trained to take a history and deal with situations of abuse? I don't know any who are. Does the cashier call the cops on every girl who fails to produce ID in case she's being abused?

@25 - no, she winds up getting an abortion after her parents find out. and hopefully dont' blame her. I think the hope is that requiring an ID will require the girl to tell a parent or other adult what happened.

@16- Firstly, fuck you.

Secondly, acknowledging that kids behave badly and helping fix it is not the same as encouraging kids to act badly. According to your logic we shouldn't stitch up a kid's head wound if they were skateboarding without a helmet.