It’s still very much a man’s world isn’t it? Sure women have every opportunity to fail or succeed based on their inherent ability and desire. There have been plenty of successful women whom have proven emphatically that every girls dream can come true if only they would apply themselves. Why the very face of America is a single, black, career woman. Perhaps the next president of the United States may very well be a woman. Stranger things have happened and it’s not wholly unimaginable when you consider that some of the most powerful CEO’s in America are also women.
So then why is it that the comforts afforded to men in the marketplace are not extended to women in the land of “always low prices” Wal-Mart? In other words, why is that men can purchase drugs to correct erectile dysfunction (presumably for recreation and not to make babies) but women cannot purchase emergency contraception (EC) (also known as Emergency Birth Control (EBC), the morning-after pill, or postcoital contraception)? There appears to be a rather hypocritical value judgment being made with respect to the needs of men and women respectively that is ultimately very harmful to society at large.
According to the AP, ”Backed by abortion rights groups, three Massachusetts women sued Wal-Mart on Wednesday, accusing the retail giant of violating a state regulation by failing to stock emergency contraception pills in its pharmacies.
The lawsuit, filed in state court, seeks to force the company to carry the morning-after pill in its 44 Wal-Marts and four Sam Club stores in Massachusetts.
The plaintiffs argued that state policy requires pharmacies to provide all "commonly prescribed medicines."
Wal-Mart carries the morning-after pill in Illinois only, where it is required under state law, said Dan Fogleman, a spokesman for Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart.
Fogleman said the company "chooses not to carry many products for business reasons." He would not elaborate. But in a letter to a lawyer for the plaintiffs, a Wal-Mart attorney said the store chain does not regard the drug as "commonly prescribed."
I’m getting pretty sick and tired of being told by Wal-Mart how one should conduct their behavior in private. I haven’t been this angry since I bought the double covers Metallica album “Garage Inc.” and realized that it had been censored. It is not the responsibility of Wal-Mart to promote “values” as dictated by chain store that employs sweatshops and wages far below the cost of living.
From what I understand, despite their claim that not carrying any version of the morning-after pill was a “business decisions,” in reality, the impetus of this decisions stems from their first allegiance to the religious right in America.
According to a May, 2005 article by Jeff Sellers in Christianity Today -- America's leading Evangelical Christian magazine, “Indeed, based in the Bible Belt town of Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart has a tradition of tailoring its service to churchgoing customers. It sells only the sanitized versions of hip-hop CDs bearing warnings of objectionable content. Responding to a campaign by the largest evangelical mutual fund group, The Timothy Plan, to keep Cosmopolitan magazine covers out of view of Wal-Mart customers, the company slapped plastic sheathes over suggestive women's periodicals and banned 'lad mags' such as Maxim.”
So essentially, the rub here is that the good Christians running Wal-Mart figure that if they don’t sell the product, its absence will somehow encourage abstinence among their female patrons. Yes, Sally Mae will not be able to get her fill of Preven and thus will just give up her desire for premarital sex. As God as my witness, the people who made this decision have apparently never met an illegitimate or unwanted child in their money grubbing lives.
First off, their whole premise is false. Wal-Mart and other pro-life advocates have lumped Preven, Plan B or any number of emergency contraception together as drugs that cause abortions. This of course is the gospel of misinformation.
Wikipedia states that the difference between an emergency contraception like Plan B, and an abortion causing drug is that, “(EC’s are) hormones that act both to prevent ovulation or fertilization, or the subsequent implantation of a fertilized egg (zygote). ECPs are not to be confused with chemical abortion drugs like Mifepristone (formerly RU-486) that act after implantation has occurred.”
Even if you believe that life begins at conception, technically, what an EC is supposed to do is prevent conception from taking place at all. There is no abortion because at the time of ingesting the drug, there is no baby per se. When you consider the facts in case like this, the entire argument purported by the religious community does not pass muster. But hey, this is America, where logic is a dead philosophy.
Looking at this situation from a different angle, suppose Wal-Mart is in the right and there is an ethical issue that needs to be considered here. OK, so now you have a situation where there will by less resources available to teenage girls and adults who, despite well-intentioned abstinence programs, will find themselves in the throws of passion and will most likely be stricken with an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy. It is always the conservatives who make it damn near impossible for real human beings to avoid having children they didn’t want in the first place and then turn around and make it even harder for those people or that woman to care adequate for said bastard.
Having said that, the societal consequences of bringing yet more unwanted children into this mortal coil are far worse than any imagined sin against man due to premarital sex. According to Nancy Felipe Russo, Ph.D., Arizona State University and Henry P. David, Ph.D., Transnational Family Research Institute in an opinion piece they wrote on 3/05/02, ”Both unintended and unwanted childbearing can have negative health, social, and psychological consequences. Health problems include greater chances for illness and death for both mother and child. In addition, such childbearing has been linked with a variety of social problems, including divorce, poverty, child abuse, and juvenile delinquency. In one study, unwanted children were found less likely to have had a secure family life. As adults they were more likely to engage in criminal behavior, be on welfare, and receive psychiatric services. Another found that children who were unintended by their mothers had lower self-esteem than their intended peers 23 years later.
The adverse health consequences of teenagers' inability to control their childbearing can be particularly severe. Teenage mothers are more likely to suffer toxemia, anemia, birth complications, and death. Babies of teenage mothers are more likely to have low birth weight and suffer birth injury and neurological defects. Such babies are twice as likely to die in the first year of life as babies born to mothers who delay childbearing until after age 20.
Wal-Mart’s new slogan should be, “Viagra first, Woman and Children Last.” Women may have made great political and economic gains but ultimately if Wal-Mart is any kind of indicator, it is clear that woman and children are still considered on some level to be second-class citizens.
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