American women are not making enough babies, and the Louisiana legislature noticed. Every ten woman need to produce 21 children (usually expressed as 2.1 children per woman) to maintain the current size of the United States population. Many women are choosing to have no children or only one or two. This is a consequence of education and opportunity, rather than of medication and infertility. Fewer children means fewer young adults in the near future to pay for all that good stuff, like Social Security and Medicare, that we old people were promised we would get if we merely made a point of surviving into our sixties or seventies. The government could collect more money from payroll taxes and thereby ensure the survival of these social services by facilitating the eligibility of immigrants to get jobs and pay taxes, but our ‘leaders’ insist that that accommodation would “poison the blood” of our country and produce an increasingly off-white population. Heaven forbid.
Even as our citizenry produces fewer children, many of its women insist on exercising the right to reproductive choices that they enjoyed for more than five decades. (Remember Roe v. Wade?) These choices included birth control pills, intrauterine devices, and abortion. Louisiana and several other state legislatures decided that these reproductive options were downright sinful and violated their longstanding religious views. Of course, these legislators were and are mostly male. In Louisiana, seventy-eight percent of House members and 87 percent of Senate members are male, and they decided, along with the Governor, that any action ending a pregnancy other than the delivery of a baby was unlawful. Indeed, even when Mother Nature rejects the viability of a fetus and causes a miscarriage, the state of Louisiana investigates the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy failure with all the rigor and intrusiveness customarily reserved for a homicide inquiry.
In light of this unfortunate thinning of the current population and expanding sinfulness of the residual population, the Louisiana state legislature realized it could address both problems by co-opting the role of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by deciding to which drugs affecting the state birthrate woman should have access. It traditionally has been the FDA that decides if a drug is safe and effective for sale and use in the United States. Louisiana found this process incompatible with what its legislature demanded.
Over the past century, the FDA has screened pharmaceuticals and devices for safety and medical efficacy. Louisiana’s lawmakers, for the most part unburdened by medical or scientific training, realized that the FDA allowed two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, to be used by pregnant women to terminate unwanted or unsafe pregnancies. In their righteous zeal, these legislators concluded that the FDA had made a grievous error in approving use of these drugs. They had already agreed that women and their physicians did not have the right to make reproductive choices that would deny the State of Louisiana the blessing of unwanted children and nonviable fetuses. Consequently, access to these drugs that made abortions relatively safe had to be banned.
The Louisiana House of Representatives voted 64 to 29 to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol as Controlled Substances. This reclassification and the associated penalties of up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $5,000 for unauthorized ‘possession’ of these drugs will effectively ban legal access to these pills in Louisiana. The Louisiana Senate voted 29 to 7 in support of the House ban on these drugs.
Identifying these drugs as Controlled Substances subjects them to limitations applied to highly addicting and abused medications, such as Oxycontin, Xanax, Valium, etc. Despite mifepristone and misoprostol’s not being used repeatedly and their not producing any dependence, they are classified with drugs that are used repeatedly and do cause addiction. Consequently, the State of Louisiana requires special prescriptions for their acquisition and special licensing for physicians intent on prescribing them. Other state legislatures (all of which are male-dominated) that have banned abortions will undoubtedly follow Louisiana’s lead in reclassifying these drugs and thereby eliminating one more tool available to women to choose when, with whom, and how often they have children.
Whether or not we shall have alternative methods for birth control throughout the United States depends on who wins the next election. Intrauterine devices and ‘morning after pills’ interfere with the implantation in the uterus of fertilized eggs or early embryos (that are already being referred to as unborn children) and are abortifacients by another name. The antichoice lobbyists are most likely to focus on these devices and pills once they have eliminated all access to abortions. Next comes birth control pills. These pills are simply hormones that interfere with the maturation and release of any of the thousands of eggs in each adult woman’s ovaries. To the antichoice legislators, this is a frustration of Nature’s plan. Each egg is a potential human being. Legislators can easily eliminate the threat to these potential human beings by reclassifying birth control pills as Controlled Substances.
President John Tyler had 15 children. Marlon Brando acknowledged that he had 10 children but most biographers believe it was closer to 15. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. had 11 children by his wife. Whether wealthy or poor, famous or obscure, men have demonstrated little restraint in impregnating women. While swelling the population of our planet to the breaking point, men in general have demonstrated no inclination to expand the reproductive choices legally available to women. None of the recent decline in the birthrate amongst U.S, citizens can be attributed to initiatives adopted or promoted by the male members of our society. On the contrary, most legislative and judicial bodies in our country have been unflinching in their opposition to measures that allow women to have reproductive choices.
One need only go back to the diatribes against birth control pills promoted in the 1960s and 1970s to discover the rationales that will soon re-emerge to justify banning easy or any access to them. One of the many ironies in this backwards march is that the abortion pills effectively banned in Louisiana have proved safer than birth control pills, and birth control pills were long ago found to be safer than pregnancy and childbirth. Illegal abortions by unqualified providers, dangerous abortifacients, bogus birth control devices, and fraudulent birth control pills will fill the vacuums left as women’s choices are eliminated by our elected officials and the judges they appoint.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
