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Military Charts Movement of Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos:

The actual information itself is depressing. That they have a graph that charts from Peace to Chaos, though?

I apologize in advance for the cranky post. I trust that, if you don't care, you'll do as you always do and scroll on by.

USA Today: Abstinence message goes beyond teens:

Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.
...

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.

"The message is 'It's better to wait until you're married to bear or father children,' " Horn said. "The only 100% effective way of getting there is abstinence."

First, this is not public health policy, it's ideology. To suggest otherwise is absurd. It's one thing to consider children borne in wedlock the ideal state of affairs. (I would argue, though, if you are only going for the ideal state of affairs, you may as well do psychological profiles on said married couples, do genetic screenings to minimize the risk of congenital disorders and hereditary illness, monitor families 24/7 to ensure that children are being raised in an optimal environment, ...) It's another thing to espouse that as the only legitimate option. It's a third thing altogether to use public policy to lie (by omission) your way there.

Just because abstinence is the "only 100% effective way" (that's my second gripe), does not make it the only way, especially in a population for whom the 'preservation of innocence' rhetoric falls by the wayside. There are many safe and very effective means of birth control and preventing transmission of most sexually transmitted infections.

Second, I have a huge problem with that 100% statistic. For all the other forms of contraception, the stated percentage efficacies include failures of compliance. If a condom breaks or is used improperly, that's a failure. If a woman misses her oral contraceptive for a couple of days, ovulates, and gets pregnant, that's considered a failure.

But abstinence is stated as 100%, end of story. It's unassailable fact. Who would argue that not having sex is 100% effective as birth control?

But what about the failure rate? You'd have to be truly naïve to believe that 100% of people who commit to abstinence until marriage do not have children until wedlock. Nevertheless, the 100% number is accepted as incontrovertible fact. And that allows people like Wade Horn to overstate their ideological policy as common sense public health.

Why do I care about what the US does? Because I'm writing an exam on Friday on Reproductive Medicine, and I have no clear information about how exactly an oral contraceptive works and I have less information about how emergency contraception (Plan B) works.

Why should this be? The oral contraceptive is one of the most prescribed drugs in medicine. Millions of women have used it for decades. The emergency contraceptive, like birth control pills, is an exogenous hormone. The fact that we use it so much suggests to me that, at least, we should have decent testable theories about how it works.

But we don't. Because reproductive medicine touches into political areas. Drug companies have to muddy the waters about these pills because a reasonable mechanism to explain why Plan B works after ovulation has to include the possibility that a fertilized egg is prevented from implanting -- a situation some people consider equivalent to abortion and, hence, murder. So they fudge things so people with ideological objections don't object and they can sell their drugs. And, in the mean time, they make my brain hurt.

Wow, that was long. If you've just skipped to the end, allow me to sum up. Politics sucks, and makes me work harder than I ought to have to.