OMG!!! Teen Sex Cults!!!

by hilzoy

I knew that the FDA had decided to ignore the findings of its own scientific advisory panel when it denied permission to sell Plan B over the counter. As the NYT reports:

"After the agency's advisory committees voted in favor of over-the-counter status for Plan B at the end of 2003, and after it was further approved at every level of the agency's professional staff, standard procedure would have been for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research arm of the F.D.A. to approve the application. But one member of the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee had reservations: Dr. W. David Hager, a Christian conservative whom President Bush appointed to lead the panel in 2002. (After an outcry from women's groups, who were upset at Dr. Hager's writing that he used Jesus as a model for how he treated women in his gynecology practice, he was shifted from chairman of the panel to ordinary member.) Dr. Hager said he feared that if Plan B were freely available, it would increase sexual promiscuity among teenagers. F.D.A. staff members presented research showing that these fears were ungrounded: large-scale studies showed no increase in sexual activity when Plan B was available to them, and both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Adolescent Medicine endorsed the switch to over-the-counter status. Others argued that the concern was outside the agency's purview: that the F.D.A.'s mandate was specifically limited to safety and did not extend to matters like whether a product might lead to people having more sex."

But the Times reports a detail I somehow missed a few weeks ago:

"Meanwhile a government report later found that Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy commissioner for operations at the F.D.A., had also expressed a fear that making the drug available over the counter could lead to "extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.""

Excuse me? Sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B??? This is the same sort of completely nutty paranoia that gave us all those lurid stories of satanic ritual abuse in which whole towns full of apparently normal people were said to dance around fires at night, wearing only the heads of goats, and sacrificing infants and eating their hearts. (One alleged "expert" claimed that there were 40,000-60,000 victims of ritual murder each year in the US, which is odd -- you'd think more people would have noticed all those vanishing citizens.)

Someone who thinks this way is the deputy commissioner for operations at the FDA? -- Every time I think that this administration has lost the power to astonish me, it turns out that I'm wrong. I can't imagine what will top this, but I'm sure something will.

Sheesh.

Comments

[modus potus]

Well, there is a bit of a difference between ritual infanticide and group sex. But I have to admit that using the threat of teenage sex cults to inhibit the availability of Plan B makes as much sense as claiming that someone might find a way to "cook" it into anabolic steroids (i.e. no sense at all).

[Nicholas]

Will you sent me your template design? I dig your layout and I hate this conventional shit blogger.com provides.

[Dan]

"...extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults..."

This from old Woodcock, eh?

[Anarch]

This post by Kevin Drum seems apropos. Not to mention Amanda Marcotte et al on the War On Fucking.

[robd]

Are they just as upset about the teen-suicide-cults brought on by widely-available guns?

[Bharat]

What is this

[Ginger Yellow]

The hilarious thing about this is that to believe Plan B would lead to these cults, you have to completely ignore the fact that other, considerably less risky, forms of contraception exist and are available without prescription, which would be far more likely to induce "sex cult" behaviour were such a thing even vaguely plausible in the first place.

Digby, as usual, has the http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_digbysblog_archive.html#114600008253976488>definitive post on this.

[bleh]

Bit of a detail, perhaps, but the difference between Hager being chairman of the advisory panel and being an "ordinary member" is purely symbolic. When it comes to advisory panel hearings, it's all pretty collegial anyway, the agenda is predetermined, and everybody's vote counts the same.

Also, the FDA is not required to follow an advisory panel's advice, although they usually do. For this reason, Woodcock is a much more important figure in the story.

And as to these teenage sex cults, um, where and when, exactly, are they meeting...?

[Matt Weiner]

Isn't it a bit odd to say that women's groups were upset at Hager's "writing that he used Jesus as a model for how he treated women in his gynecology practice"? I thought they were upset at his extreme conservative views. His forcible sodomy of his wife didn't come up before his appointment, I don't think, so women's groups weren't yet upset at that.

[SomeOtherDude]

Sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B???

Through in some lesbian witches and I'll start taking it!!

[SomeOtherDude]

Sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B???

Throw in some lesbian witches and I'll start taking it!!

[Susan]

"Teenage sex cults" (?!) reminds me of Tom Coburn's comment during the Oklahoma senate race that high schools there were rampant nests of lesbianism.

Evidently holy right wing minds spend a hell of a lot of time waayy down in the gutter, eh?

[xanax]

Is there something teenagers wouldn't form a sex cult around?

If so, things must really have changed since my youth.

[lily]

I described this situation to a student of mine, an eleventh grader wo is writing a research paper on Plan B, and she was outraged. She said, "What do those people think we are? That's gross! I only have sex with my boyfriend."

[Jackmormon]

A fortyish German woman I knew once told me about her wild teenaged years when all of the Gymnasium kids would occasionally gather at parties in various family households to have group sex. To hear her describe it, it sounded rather pastoral.

I was, to put it mildly, a bit shocked by her matter-of-fact description of it, and then, almost simultaneously, we both said, "Of course, that was before AIDS."

Any teenaged sex cults that are in operation now should be organized around condoms, not Plan B (which is actually no fun at all).

[T.R. von Hossenpheffer's Pickle Funporium]

That's it. I'm gonna build a compound.

[KCinDC]

I suspect that the title of this post has brought new visitors, some of whom may make comments but few of whom are likely to stick around.

[Fledermaus]

Tisk . . . tisk, kids these days. If it's not Dungeons and Dragons, it's the teen sex cults. This is what happens when you stop teaching creation theory in school.

[John Thullen]

My 9th grade buddies and I formed a teenaged sex cult, We met in the back of the school bus. Problem was, there was no sex. Not only that, but there were no girls either. Just one guy describing his mythical activites with whats-her-name.

"She did what?" we would gasp.

Then, later, I would ask my friend to explain to me what the "What" was we had been talking about. He would say, "if you can't figure it out, I'm not telling you".

Because he didn't know either.

The one thing that gives me hope about the eventual dissolution of today's two-headed hydra of a Republican Party (libertarianism lying down with religious fundamentalistism) is that ....

..... the disposition of jism will cause a schism in the isms.

[John Thullen]

My 9th grade buddies and I formed a teenaged sex cult, We met in the back of the school bus. Problem was, there was no sex. Not only that, but there were no girls either. Just one guy describing his mythical activites with whats-her-name.

"She did what?" we would gasp.

Then, later, I would ask my friend to explain to me what the "What" was we had been talking about. He would say, "if you can't figure it out, I'm not telling you".

Because he didn't know either.

The one thing that gives me hope about the eventual dissolution of today's two-headed hydra of a Republican Party (libertarianism lying down with religious fundamentalistism) is that ....

..... the disposition of jism will cause a schism in the isms.

[John Thullen]

If you read the second comment in Donald Ducks' voice, it's funnier than the first one.