The idiots at ABC News have an article in which they describe the efforts of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to get good information out there about emergency contraception, and they get it all wrong:

Plan B, the brand name for emergency contraception, can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus after a woman has unprotected sex or experiences contraceptive failure (like a condom breaking). It has to be taken within 72 hours of having sex and is made of the same hormones used in birth control pills.

Look, it prevents ovulation, OK? Not implantation.

They’re interviewing ob-gyns about their campaign against misinformation and encouraging people to be prepared, and instead of asking how the damned pill works, they repeat the same old bogus story the anti-contraception kooks are spreading around.

DarkSyde has a post on this at dKos. And I have to say that the commenters there who keep insisting that there might be a remote possibility of some other effect than on ovulation are irritatingly obtuse. I had to write this in reply to one of them.

How many times do I have to say this? There is ABSOLUTELY NO CLINICAL EVIDENCE FOR ANY EFFECT OTHER THAN ON OVULATION. Vague hypotheticals that it might do X, Y, or Z don’t cut it, unless you’ve got some supporting observations.

This is exactly how the pro-choice movement shoots itself in the foot. Take some remote, unlikely, unsupported possibility that sometime, somewhere, some zygote might not implant, and use that negligible unlikelihood to make dithering progressives get all tentative and weak-kneed. Jebus. Even if one in a million times some zygote got flushed (compared to the 500,000 times in a million that it will be spontaneously aborted), WHO CARES? Is it worth giving an abortion-doctor-killer somewhere a little bit of a sanctimonious boost in the execution of his God-given mission to make sex a little bit more guilt-inducing?

I also said that whatever negligible possibility of other forms of interference exists is negated by the remote possibility that an angel might dash up the woman’s vagina to escort God’s favorite sperm directly to the waiting egg. Can we just call it a wash and stop playing the game the Religious Right wants us to play on this issue?

I ♥ Bluey, the Body Rights Thingamabob.

In the discussion about the Minnesota GOP platform, this comment from Molly made me think about what it would be like if Republicans were consistent in their attitudes towards sex and guns.

If Republicans taught gun safety like they do sex education, they would:

• allow everyone to own a gun (even more, they’d require it: gunlessness is an abomination), but they’d insist that kids could never, ever take them out of their holster, sheath or gun rack
• it would be illegal to expose your weapon or even talk about it
• exposing a gun on TV would outrage viewers, who would deluge the network with complaining phone calls
• blanks, trigger locks, and even safeties would be forbidden
• there would be accidental discharges every night in every teenager’s home, but no one would ever talk about it
• it would be a shameful sin to go off by yourself and practice shooting at targets
• the only acceptable use would be to kill something, although it would be OK to miss if you were sincerely trying to kill something
• most hunters would be desperately hoping to miss every time they went hunting, and would try to contrive situations in which they could fire their guns without actually hitting anything

It seems like a useful analogy to me. If it’s common sense gun ownership to know how to clean and maintain the thing, to practice sensible gun safety rules, and to treat it as a responsibility that demands knowledge and care and good understanding of its operation, why not expect the same of people who own a penis or vagina? There’s nothing about knowing how something works that is antithetical to the idea that one should refrain from using it for its intended purpose, whether that is killing something or getting it pregnant, and in fact, we know that understanding in detail how something works is the best way to prevent it from going off inadvertently.

As it is, they’re in a situation where they are tacitly favoring accidental, unplanned accidents over the possibility that kids will intentionally practice safe operation of their equipment.