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Great Moments in "Accurate Language"

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Via Bitch, Ph.D., we read about the latest uninformed plea for “accurate language” to describe Plan B.

Behold:

“Plan B (the morning after pill) “can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex.”

So states a sentence matter-of-factly in various AP articles today regarding a woman’s complaint against the Kroger Co. because a pharmacist refused to provide her with Plan B, the massive dose of birth control pills permitted for sale by the FDA (thanks to the new FDA chief appointed by Bush) that either 1) destroys the fetus immediately after conception by preventing it from attaching to the womb, flushing it out of the mother’s system, 2) prevents the egg from joining with the sperm, or 3) stops the egg from being released (these three descriptions can be found on the Plan B website). The mainstream media-censored description of Plan B never mentions that one of the three ways Plan B works is to destroy the life of the fetus. This is one of the most clear-cut examples of media bias.

One could develop a pretty good drinking game around this paragraph — if we figure one swig of Beefeater per factual error, I’d be filled with a gentle, undeserved love for humanity by the end of that first run-on sentence. As Bitch points out, Rachel Alexander can’t even read the Duramed website correctly, instead insisting that anti-choice fantasy (e.g., “destroys the fetus”) substitute for a clinically accurate account of the drug — a drug that is, of course, not a “massive dose of birth control pills” but rather an elevated (two-pill) dose of progesterone that does not “destroy the fetus” because there is no such critter to destroy.

More interesting to me is the deliberate inversion of Plan B’s effects. As a high dose of progesterone, its primary (and only clinically-demonstrated) effect is to prevent ovulation; instead, Alexander gives primary emphasis to an effect that conservates have simply invented to attack a drug they won’t condone for their own peculiar reasons. Along the way, we’re even reminded of the scientacular “statistic” — a popular one among the anti-choice crowd, drawn as it is from an unreliable data set — that “83 percent” of women who go through abortion procedures later experience “regret.”

Taken on its own the post is an illiterate throw-away, unworthy of mention except for the extent to which it expresses a symptomatic wingnut hostility to anything resembling a sober, accurate description of Plan B. Alexander even goes so far as to chide Duramed for not including “pictures” to illustrate the pills’ effects. I can only assume that the photos she has in mind were last seen waving on a stick outside a clinic in Omaha.

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