In a post this afternoon, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan takes a look at a Room for Debate that asked, after the CVS chain announced it would stop selling tobacco products, “What unhealthy products should CVS stop selling?” One of the answers, from Donna J. Harrison, the executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, was the emergency contraceptives ella and Plan B, which, she argued, “are also incompatible with health care provision:”
The unfettered availability of emergency contraception raises serious concerns, not least because access to Plan B does not reduce the number of unintended pregnancies or abortions. Aside from being ineffective, over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptive is harmful to women’s health. It isolates the most at-risk women (teenagers and those in unstable relationships) from getting the medical care they need to diagnose sexually transmitted diseases and access appropriate contraceptive counseling. And in certain situations, emergency contraception may act by blocking a newly conceived embryo from implanting, rather than by preventing fertilization – and not all consumers will be aware of the difference, especially girls and women with limited access to medical care. This is not a product to be sold over the counter, with no more consultation than buying M&M’s.
Sullivan, in response to reader complaints, including from physicians:
In general, I’m a fan of Room for Debate, but I think it works best when opposing views can be aired within the format. That wasn’t the case here. Dr. Harrison’s contribution, with its questionable statements on this sensitive and important subject, unfortunately appears to have The Times’s imprimatur.
And that’s all the more troubling because Dr. Harrison’s point of view is one that runs counter to scientific consensus: that this kind of emergency contraception is safe. It’s almost as if – within the context of some barely related overall question — the only writer on the topic of climate change was one who denied its existence or the only writer on evolution was a creationist. Dr. Harrison’s view is outside the medical mainstream but, as the singular voice, gets all the trappings of approval.
That may have made for a more attention-getting “Room for Debate,” but certainly a less valid one.
But it’s not just that Harrison maintained incorrectly that emergency contraception is unsafe (a topic taken up by some of the parties who filed amicus briefs in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases currently before the Supreme Court). It’s also that she argued that it’s both “ineffective” and evilly effective (“in certain situations, emergency contraception may act by blocking a newly conceived embryo from implanting, rather than by preventing fertilization.”) Here, like many opponents of emergency contraception, she wants to have it both ways: she claims it doesn’t work, and yet argues it still can work in ways that make it an “abortifacient,” even though it is not classified as such by the FDA. Contra Harrison, and the editor who defended presenting her views, the scientific consensus is that ella and Plan B function by preventing ovulation. According to the Mayo Clinic, “If you’re already pregnant when you take the morning-after pill, the treatment will be ineffective and won’t harm the developing baby.”
This issue is important not only because of the Times’ journalistic standards, which Sullivan admirably lays out, but because in these important cases before the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs claim that ella and Plan B are abortifacients and therefore covering them infringes on their sincerely held religious beliefs. In ruling for Hobby Lobby, the Tenth Circuit brushed aside questions of how ella and Plan B work, maintaining that if the plaintiffs’ religious belief is life begins at conception, then it’s not up to the courts to question how the drugs work if the plaintiffs believe they might cause an abortion. But as Chief Judge Mary Briscoe noted in dissent:
the connection is not one of religious belief, but rather of purported scientific fact, i.e., how the challenged contraceptives operate to prevent pregnancy. Consequently, rather than being off limits to examination, plaintiffs’ allegations regarding the abortion-causing potential of the challenged drugs are subject not only to examination but evidentiary proof. In short, they must be proven by plaintiffs on the basis of sufficient evidence. . . . plaintiffs’ tactical decision to present no evidence on this point appears, to me, to prevent them from establishing that the regulatory requirement to provide health care coverage encompassing these drugs substantially burdens their exercise of religion.
As glad as I am that Sullivan flatly rejected the unexamined dissemination of unscientific views, this debates aren’t just about science. These claims about ella and Plan B continue to swirl around debates about religious freedom. Does religious freedom protect the rejection of science and evidence-based policy?
