The Food and Drug Administration is still deliberating whether to make Plan B available over the counter. The morning-after pill prevents an agg from being fertilized if taken within 72 hours after intercourse. It does not cause abortion. If available without prescription 1.3 million abortions and 1.5 million unintended pregnancies could be prevented, according to the USA Today article, 'Plan B' beats abortion. Critics and the FDA are concerned that unprotected intercourse among teens will increase with easier access to the pill. Barr Pharmaceuticals, creators of Plan B proposed a new plan to require those under 15 to have a prescription. Without more data about how teens will use the pill the FDA feels it cannot make an informed decision.
In order for young girls to safely use the pill some physicians say they must have control over its distribution. Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America said, " the morning-after pill is a pedophile's best friend. Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines." Although this may be true, easier access to the pill could reduce the number of children born into abusive situations. " The FDA's job, by law, is to judge the safety and efficacy of drugs, not the morality of people who use them."http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2005-01-20-plan-b-our_x.htm
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I'm not exactly sure what to comment about here. Is this thread about Plan B, or premarital sex, or morality?
For the purposes of this discussion I am only talking about recreational sex. If a couple wants to get pregnant, that is a different set of choices.
The choice of whether or not to have recreational sex is, in and of itself, a situation in which there is a prisoner's dilemna (see Chapter 10 in the Salvatore text). In this case, sex is a game with two players, who can choose two strategies: have sex, or don't. For the time being assume that the former appears to be more beneficial for each player. The problem is that if the players both want to have sex (and do) that the outcome can be bad for both (an unintended pregnancy). The difference from the classic prisoner's dilemna is that the bad outcome in not certain. But, just like the classic prisoner's dilemna, there are two equilibria - a bad one and a good one - with the former being more common.
What Plan B does is reduce the probability but not the cost of that bad outcome. This will tend to make the bad equilibrium occur more commonly but with lower cost - that is, recreational sex will become more common.
Abstinence amounts to reweighting the outcomes for individuals so that the strategies that lead to no recreational sex are chosen more often.
This should make it clear that abstinence and Plan B are really unrelated decisions. Abstinence is fine, but it is irrelevent if the deed is done.
So, the choice is really between the marginal benefits of offering Plan B to those who need it, versus the marginal costs to society associated with making it legal.
I'm not sure that anyone knows how to weigh or balance those. But, I can tell you that economics gives us a pretty firm answer about what will happen in the real world: Plan B will be made available, and at a price that will satisfy the people who need to use it. The reason has to do with an area called public choice. One of the basic ideas of public choice is that small vocal minorities can get their way in a democracy if they can spread the costs of their actions over a large enough majority. This seems to me to fit that definition well: there is a small minority that will benefit greatly from this, and a large majority that (on net) may not approve, but for whom the costs are too small to fight over. The minority almost always wins in those cases.
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