Should birth control pills be sold without a prescription?

[MetalMagpie]

everyone should be sterilized at birth and the genetic material stored until you have means to look after a child

bam, overpopulation, terrible parenting and teen pregnancy gone.

shame people aren't that logical oh well.

Interesting idea, but would be hideously expensive to implement. In the UK, IVF treatment costs an average of £4000. So if every baby had to be conceived this way, it would cost the British government just under £3billion a year. And that's before they've paid for all the sterilizations!

ok, i wasn't being completely serious

but on the other hand, how much do social workers, welfare funds
for the unemployed /single parents cost? plus billions in tax credit for low earning families?

everything costs money!

Total child benefit payments in the UK come to £10billion a year, but you'd only eliminate that if you eliminated children entirely. Most child benefit payments go to working parents. Other benefits (such as the jobseekers allowance) would be unaffected as they don't rely on having kids. Children who end up in the care system have bad parents (or no parents), not necessarily poor parents. So you probably wouldn't lower the social care bill by very much if you stopped people with no income having kids.

And you're right - everything costs money! So in addition to £3billion a year for IVF and £400million a year for removing eggs from baby girls (I'm leaving out boys - see below), you also need to factor in the ongoing cost of adequate facilities to store frozen eggs for 30 million British women (and rising).

It's most sensible to only sterilize girls because baby girls already have all their eggs inside them. So you can remove those and freeze them. But baby boys don't produce sperm, so there's nothing useful to freeze. Using DNA from other cells to make a foetus multiplies the cost of IVF by a factor of 10 or more. Leaving all the boys fertile (at least until they start producing viable sperm) is workable as long as the programme for girls has near-total coverage, and border control is tight.

But a far cheaper (and more practical) alternative to all of this is to sterilize women after their first child if they don't pass a background check. Western women tend to give birth in hospitals anyway, and one in three mothers in the USA (couldn't find stats for Britain) has a cesarean section, so they're already on an operating table. This policy wouldn't stop "inappropriate" parents having their first child, but it would stop them having any more, and at very low cost.

Sorry, I'm quite fond of chewing over the practicality of dystopian-style ideas.

 

[wearesoneutralthatithurts]

No, the drug does not JUST prevent conception. It can be overdosed on with freaky side-effects. At the same time a doctor should only be allowed to deny the prescription based on real medical harm to the patient and certainly not deny her for moral reasons.

You can't overdose on the pill, the side effects occur from normal usage.

You can overdose on -anything-, not necessarily causing death. Taking too many birth control pills can result in uncomfortable side effects like excessive vaginal bleeding.

Of course there's also the whole potential of being allergic to the things but that is a very rare case.

Well sure you can overdose on ANYTHING. Any pill I've taken has said there has never been a recorded case of overdose of that particular brand so I assume that instances of overdose are so rare that it shouldn't be a factor when determining whether the pill should require prescription or not. You'd have to take a ridiculous amount in a day, I mean, you could overdose on cough drops if you really tried.

1.yes. should be. anyone who thinks "oh hormones, bad and dangerous", please research 1. these pills( being able to read statistics is important) and 2. the way society restricts female sexuality while simultaneously selling sexiness as an very important thing to archive for women and the implications and problems which women have to face if they want birth control or-god forbade an abortion(often because they didnt get a good birth control?)
yeah, female bodies are controlled by kyriarchy-or are there any of these discussions about male sexuality-because, last time i knew there are 2 necessary to make a child. Only that one of them is expected to care about if and the other one can go and say "eh, not my business without getting shame or stress and real, physical problems because of pregnancy"(but times change. hopefully.)


and 2-The dangers of stuff.

if you overdose paracetamol (acetaminophen or such is called) or aspirine or any of these you will get SERIOUS problems like DEATH, severe internal bleeding, liver failure etc. (this is a reason why here in germany you cant buy much at once and some people thought about forbidding over-the counter-buying of these Pills because there are many reports of liver failure and usually its so that if your doc prescribes you that stuff he prescribes some drug which helps your body to counter the bad side-effects

if you overdose the pill (why should you? these arent working better if you take more-as counterexample to aspirine which might need 2 pills to get the pain away) there wont be bad consequences-because ther are no reported.
and some pills you CAN overdose-because you can use them like the pill after-so if you had sex and the condom broke you can use SOME birth-control pills and you wont have to go to some doc and have your sex-life and yourself questioned.


so, jeah, birth control pills are MUCH MORE SAFER than aspirine. so they should be free. ( i am pretty sure that aspirine, if it were a new drug would never have this status as it has now because it has serious side effects which arent as rare as most people think.)

and our society tends to control womens sexuality and this is another way-to say "no they will have more sex this way" (which is absolute BS-and if so, well no fucking problem, let people have much sex as long as they protect themself and choose how much sex they want? i dont get the problem with people (espacially women, because there is no male equivalent of slut shaming*) having much sex, its a very nice thing, you now)
or as people here state
"no because women will take it and ruin their bodies so we as society have to prevent ONLY the women from this risky stuff. all people can buy rather unhealthy pain-pills but a very safe hormone-pill-no, not allowed. just because this are women-so if something happens to their precious body they never will go to the doctor to get help, amirite?"


you know-a doc could be expensive and i don't need a doc to say me that i am healthy enough for sex-this is my body, i know it and if some medicine has an effect on my body which is unusual i will go to the doctor because i have common sense-and it annoys me that the society-and well, the men in control might even think that i have not and must, therefore be controlled.

and here in germany, as woman you "should" go to the gynaecologist at least one a year/2 years because the health care pays for cervix and vaginal-cancer screening and such. So in this time you´re asked whether ypu need something, if you want kids or have some problems.



*except maybe religious groups where abstinence before marriage is important (but even then this shouldnt be forced.)

 

[MetalMagpie]

everyone should be sterilized at birth and the genetic material stored until you have means to look after a child

bam, overpopulation, terrible parenting and teen pregnancy gone.

shame people aren't that logical oh well.

Because that is totally how the body works. Sterilization is completely reversible *eyeroll*

That also sounds like the beginning of Brave New World...

OT: Birth control pills... did people forget about the NuvaRing already? It's a much better alternative from what I have heard.

at-least read my raving mad comments before dissing them, I clearly said you'd need to store the genetic material as-well!

I did read it. I'm still dismissing it:

That's not how reproduction works.

If reproduction did work like that, you are proposing something straight out of Brave New World.

Baby girls already have all their eggs inside them, so you could use a non-trivial operation to remove and freeze those. If your sterilization programme has complete female coverage, it doesn't matter if you leave boys fertile. Then when the children are adults, you can use frozen eggs and fresh sperm for normal IVF treatment.

That's assuming frozen eggs can last 20 to 30 years, which may be a bit of a stretch. (It's not something I'm very knowledgeable about. Any IVF specialists on this thread?)

The greatest challenge to this plan might actually be preventing fertile women from getting into the country. Setting up a totalitarian government who can force people to have sterilizations is easy. Border control is hard!

 

[Xan Krieger]

Is sex really this hard to avoid? This whole thing is absurd, I mean I'm 23 and haven't even been kissed so clearly I'm doing something right.

 

[Lilani]

Nope.

When you're on the pill you need to have your blood pressure taken every six months, along with a few other tests. The hormones in each brand of pill can affect individual woman differently and you really do need to be monitored. When you first have the pill prescribed, you only get 3 months because they need to see how that particular brand is affecting you.

I've personally had a terrible reaction to a particular brand of pill, as have most women I know on it but it's never caused by the same brand and the side effects are never the same.

I'm on the pill for the treatment of polycystic ovarian syndrome and I don't get my BP taken, or any other regular tests. I got an exam and a transvaginal ultrasound to confirm the diagnosis, but that was it. Maybe in some cases where the woman is at a high risk of blood pressure fluctuation or other sorts of complications, or when it comes to certain types of pills (the more powerful ones, I imagine), but otherwise I haven't heard of such a thing. You may have to get all of those things examined regularly, but from what I've been able to gather from my other friends who are also on the pill such a situation would be unusual.

-snip-

Anyway, to you OP, I'm no medical scientist, and nor do I quite understand what causes the FDA or whatever to make drugs require a prescription. I would imagine it has to do with the fact that the medicine affects hormones, something which can have drastic effects on the body and that should be carefully watched over by a doctor until the effect on the patient is known. However, if there's one thing I do understand it's that pharmaceutical companies want money. An easy way to make money on Americans is medicine, since we are one of the world's top users of them, especially over-the-counter stuff. If there were a way to make an over-the-counter version of the pill, they would have done it by now, or are spending a lot of money trying to get there as we speak.

But as it stands, a bunch of people with degrees say it should be taken only under doctor supervision, and from what I know of the pill at this point I'm inclined to agree with them. Changing the level of hormones that affect not only emotions and psychological state, but also reproduction and sexual organs isn't anywhere near on the same level as taking a bit of aspirin for a headache. I agree that America is backwards when it comes to many things involving sex education, but I think there are more feasible ways to help young people learn about sex and protect themselves from pregnancy than trying to reverse the FDA's categorization of birth control pills. Especially since all of us combined know less about this than most first-year medical students.

 

[nexus]

The morning after pill should not be an "all ages, over the counter" drug. That shit is serious, it's not exactly an aspirin. I do not agree with giving it to minors no questions asked, let alone it being an OTC medication.

We all make mistakes, but don't be so creepy and irresponsible that you need to take advantage of OTC morning-after pills every time you have sex. I mean seriously. Reevaluate your lifestyle if that is the case.

 

[The White Hunter]

No I think they should be free like here in the UK?.

Seriously it solves a lot of problems to have free contraceptives.

 

[The Lugz]

Sorry, I'm quite fond of chewing over the practicality dystopian-style ideas.

no worries, i'm happy to sit in the backseat in this one and watch everyone else do the work
i'm usually off creating practical soultions to insane problems, so it's noce to watch somone else's logic unfold
you've clearly given it way more thought than i did
and possibly more than the government does..

metal magpie for pm? .. why not.

 

[Murmillos]

I'll say one thing; anybody who is not a woman has no right or sense in debating for or against birth control in any form. That includes myself.

Because men have no say in their own child's existence, right? They should just shrug and walk off and pretend the child doesn't exist, right?

If you're removing yourself from the discussion on birth control, allow me to show you the door.

How in the hell do you logic jump that i state that its clearly only woman who should debate the merits of birth control on their own body ... to ignoring a said "hypothetical" child?

Men should not be allowed to tell women, which birth control they should or shouldn't have access too, when they should and shouldn't be allowed to take it.

 

[Voulan]

I couldn't believe that whole debacle with wanting to ban birth control during the elections (or was I only hearing an extreme view of it?). What many people don't know is that it's function is not only for birth control, but also for women's health reasons. That's why I take them, and I've never had sex before. The idea that they're evil things that allow women to fool around and abort children is ridiculous, because many take them as a type of medication.

To answer the actual thread topic, they should still be prescription based for the reasons almost everyone in the thread have already stated, but I also believe they should be much cheaper (even free) than they are now. I mean, once you start, unless you're aiming to get pregnant, you have to take them every single day, right up to menopause. That's a lot of bloody pills. If the reason you're taking them is for health issues, then the process of getting them should be much easier.

 

[lacktheknack]

I'll say one thing; anybody who is not a woman has no right or sense in debating for or against birth control in any form. That includes myself.

Because men have no say in their own child's existence, right? They should just shrug and walk off and pretend the child doesn't exist, right?

If you're removing yourself from the discussion on birth control, allow me to show you the door.

How in the hell do you logic jump that i state that its clearly only woman who should debate the merits of birth control on their own body ... to ignoring a said "hypothetical" child?

Men should not be allowed to tell women, which birth control they should or shouldn't have access too, when they should and shouldn't be allowed to take it.

Should or shouldn't allowed to take, no.

However, a man has EVERY DAMNED RIGHT to ASK her to use it. And he has EVERY DAMNED RIGHT to ASK her NOT to use it. And he has EVERY DAMNED RIGHT to debate about the best forms of birth control and how they should be administered.

Why? It's in the name: "Birth Control". Its primary purpose is to allow or prevent pregnancy. Men have just as much right as women to want a child... or want to prevent one. The direct effects of birth control on a woman's body is a subtopic that is not so great that it precludes men from talking about it.

The fact that you should want to censor men's opinions on methods of avoiding pregnancy makes the leap from "men shouldn't talk about birth control" to "men don't get opinions on whether they want to have a child" not such a great leap after all.

 

[Quaxar]

Baby girls already have all their eggs inside them, so you could use a non-trivial operation to remove and freeze those. If your sterilization programme has complete female coverage, it doesn't matter if you leave boys fertile. Then when the children are adults, you can use frozen eggs and fresh sperm for normal IVF treatment.

That's assuming frozen eggs can last 20 to 30 years, which may be a bit of a stretch. (It's not something I'm very knowledgeable about. Any IVF specialists on this thread?)

The greatest challenge to this plan might actually be preventing fertile women from getting into the country. Setting up a totalitarian government who can force people to have sterilizations is easy. Border control is hard!

Yes and no. All the base material is indeed present from birth but the actual development into a fertilizable haploid cell, the oogenesis, is a part of the menstruation cycle so you should have issues getting usable eggs from a newborn. On the other hand if it's doable great as cells that fresh have pretty much the least possibly danger of birth defects. What possible effects decades of cryopreservation has is probably still a bit unclear, there's two big studies that say frozen eggs have about the same chance of producing healthy offsprings as fresh ones, but I'm not sure how long these samples were stored on average and even then they only looked at those that actually got fertilized. The <url=http://eggfreezingcenter.com/egg-freezing/egg-freezing-for-efc.html>Egg Freezing Center (not that good at naming probably) says only 75% of their stored eggs survive thawing and give a 40% pregnancy rate.

In any way, sterilizing the entire female population before puberty seems like a madman's idea. Best case scenario you end up unable to produce any children since you just took every available womb and milk gland and deactivated it forever worst case you end up with some kind of boobless prepubescent 40-year old. Oh, and did I mention brittle bones? Because low sexual hormone levels will totally do that to you.
It's kind of like <url=http://kallmanns.org>Kallmann syndrome for an entire population.

 

[Colour Scientist]

Nope.

When you're on the pill you need to have your blood pressure taken every six months, along with a few other tests. The hormones in each brand of pill can affect individual woman differently and you really do need to be monitored. When you first have the pill prescribed, you only get 3 months because they need to see how that particular brand is affecting you.

I've personally had a terrible reaction to a particular brand of pill, as have most women I know on it but it's never caused by the same brand and the side effects are never the same.

I'm on the pill for the treatment of polycystic ovarian syndrome and I don't get my BP taken, or any other regular tests. I got an exam and a transvaginal ultrasound to confirm the diagnosis, but that was it. Maybe in some cases where the woman is at a high risk of blood pressure fluctuation or other sorts of complications, or when it comes to certain types of pills (the more powerful ones, I imagine), but otherwise I haven't heard of such a thing. You may have to get all of those things examined regularly, but from what I've been able to gather from my other friends who are also on the pill

It's standard practice where I live. Geographical differences, I guess.

 

[Risingblade]

You probably should ask a doctor about that, this seems more a health issue than a moral issue.

 

[BOOM headshot65]

Also, the whole thing about "needing a parent's permission" to be on birth control really needs to go. This can be especially problematic for young girls who live in.. obstinate households that have "views" on this kind of thing. It's kind of like abortions in that it should NOT be a parent's choice, but the person wanting the abortion. That's pretty screwed up in certain countries and even right here in the US!

You say all that like its a bad thing.

Parents should get to decide what thier children can and cant do. Its called "Be a F***ing Parent" (something it seems too few parents do now adays). Also, you are assuming that even if the doctor gave my hypothetical daughter birth control pills that the little missy would be able to afford them. I aint paying for them (unless they are for a medical purpose), and even if they were covered by insurace I would just call up my insurance company and tell them to drop that coverage (and knock that off my premium) because the only other woman in the house would be her mother, and she doesnt need them because she wont have sex unless she wants a child.

 

[NeutralDrow]

There should be a safe and easy way for people to have access to birth control.

OTC birth control pills would be. Technically, the safest and most effective methods are IUDs and implants, but those aren't the easiest things to get (by definition, they require a doctor's help).

The morning after pill should not be an "all ages, over the counter" drug. That shit is serious, it's not exactly an aspirin.

It's certainly not. Aspirin can only cause swelling, allergic reactions, gastrointestinal bleeding, and death, lessen the effects of other medication, and be easily overdosed on. But emergency contraceptive pills can cause nausea, headaches, and a temporarily disrupted menstrual cycle!

Sarcasm aside, they're not like aspirin, but mainly because aspirin is much more potentially dangerous. Also, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure emergency contraceptive ("morning after") pills are already available OTC. Primary OC pills aren't.

You probably should ask a doctor about that, this seems more a health issue than a moral issue.

It is, but try convincing people of that.

 

[regalphantom]

Yes, the pill should require a prescription, however, that is merely because of the potential medical complications that it can cause, either through the hormone imbalance it causes or the interactions with any other medications a person may be on. A good friend of mine can't be on the pill because of the medication she is on (she suffers from a mild form of multiple personality disorder and is medicated to help her manage it so that it doesn't progress). While I don't believe that access to any form of birth control should be restricted, for many types of birth control prescriptions are necessary to ensure that they don't cause any damage to the wellbeing of the woman taking them. If there was a male birth control pill with the same effectiveness and side effects as the female birth control pill, I would argue that it should require a prescription as well. It is entirely a safety concern, and if anything more drugs, not less, should require prescriptions.

 

[MetalMagpie]

Baby girls already have all their eggs inside them, so you could use a non-trivial operation to remove and freeze those. If your sterilization programme has complete female coverage, it doesn't matter if you leave boys fertile. Then when the children are adults, you can use frozen eggs and fresh sperm for normal IVF treatment.

That's assuming frozen eggs can last 20 to 30 years, which may be a bit of a stretch. (It's not something I'm very knowledgeable about. Any IVF specialists on this thread?)

The greatest challenge to this plan might actually be preventing fertile women from getting into the country. Setting up a totalitarian government who can force people to have sterilizations is easy. Border control is hard!

Yes and no. All the base material is indeed present from birth but the actual development into a fertilizable haploid cell, the oogenesis, is a part of the menstruation cycle so you should have issues getting usable eggs from a newborn. On the other hand if it's doable great as cells that fresh have pretty much the least possibly danger of birth defects. What possible effects decades of cryopreservation has is probably still a bit unclear, there's two big studies that say frozen eggs have about the same chance of producing healthy offsprings as fresh ones, but I'm not sure how long these samples were stored on average and even then they only looked at those that actually got fertilized. The <url=http://eggfreezingcenter.com/egg-freezing/egg-freezing-for-efc.html>Egg Freezing Center (not that good at naming probably) says only 75% of their stored eggs survive thawing and give a 40% pregnancy rate.

In any way, sterilizing the entire female population before puberty seems like a madman's idea. Best case scenario you end up unable to produce any children since you just took every available womb and milk gland and deactivated it forever worst case you end up with some kind of boobless prepubescent 40-year old. Oh, and did I mention brittle bones? Because low sexual hormone levels will totally do that to you.
It's kind of like <url=http://kallmanns.org>Kallmann syndrome for an entire population.

I was sure I'd seen an article somewhere that said using an egg from a baby (even an unborn one!) for IVR was possible or even had been done. But I have lots of weird-crap-I-read-somewhere floating around in my brain and, without remembering the source, I can't be certain how reliable most of it is!

That aside, this is starting to sound like an awesome premise for a near-future scifi story. An entire generation of curve-less, super-fragile women, and the fate of the human race in question...

 

[Quaxar]

Baby girls already have all their eggs inside them, so you could use a non-trivial operation to remove and freeze those. If your sterilization programme has complete female coverage, it doesn't matter if you leave boys fertile. Then when the children are adults, you can use frozen eggs and fresh sperm for normal IVF treatment.

That's assuming frozen eggs can last 20 to 30 years, which may be a bit of a stretch. (It's not something I'm very knowledgeable about. Any IVF specialists on this thread?)

The greatest challenge to this plan might actually be preventing fertile women from getting into the country. Setting up a totalitarian government who can force people to have sterilizations is easy. Border control is hard!

Yes and no. All the base material is indeed present from birth but the actual development into a fertilizable haploid cell, the oogenesis, is a part of the menstruation cycle so you should have issues getting usable eggs from a newborn. On the other hand if it's doable great as cells that fresh have pretty much the least possibly danger of birth defects. What possible effects decades of cryopreservation has is probably still a bit unclear, there's two big studies that say frozen eggs have about the same chance of producing healthy offsprings as fresh ones, but I'm not sure how long these samples were stored on average and even then they only looked at those that actually got fertilized. The <url=http://eggfreezingcenter.com/egg-freezing/egg-freezing-for-efc.html>Egg Freezing Center (not that good at naming probably) says only 75% of their stored eggs survive thawing and give a 40% pregnancy rate.

In any way, sterilizing the entire female population before puberty seems like a madman's idea. Best case scenario you end up unable to produce any children since you just took every available womb and milk gland and deactivated it forever worst case you end up with some kind of boobless prepubescent 40-year old. Oh, and did I mention brittle bones? Because low sexual hormone levels will totally do that to you.
It's kind of like <url=http://kallmanns.org>Kallmann syndrome for an entire population.

I was sure I'd seen an article somewhere that said using an egg from a baby (even an unborn one!) for IVR was possible or even had been done. But I have lots of weird-crap-I-read-somewhere floating around in my brain and, without remembering the source, I can't be certain how reliable most of it is!

That aside, this is starting to sound like an awesome premise for a near-future scifi story. An entire generation of curve-less, super-fragile women, and the fate of the human race in question...

Huh, my bad. In Vitro Maturation (IVM) does indeed exist since the 2000s, see <url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11255547?dopt=Citation>here for a study on the topic. Still, even if we can perfect that technique you'd still be left with a generation of women practically unable to bear those children.

If you should consider writing a "Perry Rhodan and the boobless glasswomen" novel please don't forget to credit me.