It’s My Birthday

On a Wednesday!

It’s my birthday today, and voters across the country have already given me a present. There was no red wave. No Trump flag waving. No smug McConnell smirk as he prepared to take back his role as road-block to everything good and noble. There was barely a red trickle.

Sure, I would have liked to see one of the three founding members of the Secret Society of Douchey GOP Governors get ousted (Abbott, Kemp, or DeSantis, take your pick). It would have also been fun to get rid of Marjorie Taylor Green (who shockingly won 65% of the vote in her district) and Lauren Boebert (who still holds a narrow lead as of my writing). I guess a girl can’t ask for everything even on a milestone birthday (people actually voted for J.D. Vance!).

What I did get, though, was a restored faith in humanity and democracy. It’s not just that Democrats retained the Senate or that a number of governorships flipped blue. The real story is that election deniers—those people who ran on a platform of “No really, Trump won” despite oodles of proof to the contrary—were denied. All but one person in a slate of Trumpian candidates for Secretary of State lost. These people posed a real danger to future elections, and my heart rate has slowed knowing they won’t be counting the votes in 2024.

We all also got confirmation that young people will vote, and they will vote for their rights and ours. An estimated 27% of eligible young voters turned out. While that sounds pathetic (every eligible person of every age should jump at the chance to vote), this is the second highest turn out among this age group in a midterm in 30 years.

When they do turn out, young people vote Democratic. CIRCLE, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, analyzed vote tallies, exit polls. and census data. It concluded that 63% of 18- to 29-year-olds who voted went for Democrats compared to 35% who went for the GOP. (The other 2% went for other candidates or were unknown.) That split goes down to 51%/47% in the 30- to 44-year-old set and flips the other way for those 45 and older. Basic math and the process of aging (did I mention my milestone birthday?) tells us that by 2024 there will be even more young voters heading to the polls (including my oldest kid).

Moreover, we confirmed what reproductive rights activists have been saying for years: abortion matters to pro-choice voters. Abortion rights won wherever they were on the ballot, which includes Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, Montana, and California (and Kansas if you remember the August vote). I say we go full-on-Karl-Rove-wedge-issue-2004 and get this on the ballot in as many states as possible in the next presidential election.

It's not just ballot measures, however. The fear of dwindling reproductive rights drove people to the polls across the country. In NARAL’s post-election survey of voters in battleground states, 45% said abortion played a larger role in their voting decisions than it had in past elections, 52% said they were concerned that Republicans will try to ban abortion care, and 75% of voters (including 96% of Democrats, 74% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans) believe “women and doctors—not politicians and judges—should be making decisions about abortion.”

Of course, the best birthday presents were all of the headlines that called Trump a three-time loser and questioned Mitch McConnell’s political future given the GOP’s failure to regain control of the Senate despite inflation, gas prices, and Biden’s low poll numbers. I’m not saying I thrive on their suffering or anything, but happy birthday to me.

I’ll worry about school board elections (the results are mixed) and the anointing of Ron DeSantis—the don’t say gay human trafficker from Florida—as the GOP’s new savior next week. I’m sure by then I’ll already be pissed at Speaker-To-Be Kevin McCarthy.

Today, I’ll just relax, take a deep breath, and get a little older. And talk about sex, of course.  

Pill Pause: FDA Postpones Meeting on Taking the Mini-Pill Over the Counter

A meeting to discuss OTC status of the mini-pill that was scheduled for this coming Friday has been indefinitely postponed by the FDA. According to Perrigo,—the parent of HRA Pharma, the company that applied for the change in status—the FDA said it was postponing this meeting of outside experts to further review the additional information the agency had requested from the company.

As a refresher, HRA Pharma is the first company to seek FDA approval for over-the-counter birth control pills. The application covers Opill which is a progestin-only form of oral contraception sometimes referred to as the mini-pill. Unlike most birth control pills and the other forms of hormonal contraception (like the patch, shot, or ring), mini-pills do not contain estrogen, which means they have fewer side effects and carry less risk of serious side effects like blood clots. That said, they are also less effective than methods that combine estrogen and progestin and more sensitive to missed or even simply delayed doses.   

Still, for a drug to be made available without a prescription, a manufacturer must prove to the FDA that it can be safely and effectively used without professional supervision, and HRA Pharma has years of research that it believes does just that.

An FDA spokesperson told us not to read anything into this: “The postponement does not indicate or affect any decision regarding the application,” and they assured us that the agency “remains committed to a timely review of this application.” After spending more than a decade working on this issue and coming up against political and practical obstacles (the profit margins on birth control are low so most pharma companies did not want to bother trying), reproductive advocates are surely reading at least something into this decision.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll suggests that the public supports OTC pills and that many would use them if they were available. According to the survey, 77% of females ages 18 to 49 support “making birth control pills available without a doctor’s prescription if research shows they are safe and effective,” and 60% say they would be likely to use OTC pills. 

Advocates and consumers waiting on the FDA got a little help from Attorneys General across the country earlier this month when 21 of the legal leaders signed onto a letter urging the agency to approve the OTC request. The AGs argue that "approval of the pill would allow individuals—especially those from vulnerable populations—greater control over their health, lives, and futures, and help them avoid the health and economic perils that come with unwanted pregnancies."

In addition to being my birthday, today is Thanks Birth Control Day, an annual event sponsored by Power to Decide to remind us that contraception makes a big impact on individual lives and societies. Years ago, I celebrated this day with a letter of gratitude for the 25 years (give or take two pregnancies) that I spent on the pill.

This year, the AGs’ letter also works as a thank you note as they point out that benefits of birth control include, “increased health for mothers and children, lower maternal mortality, higher engagement in the workforce, economic independence for women, higher productivity in the workforce, fewer children living in poverty, better educated children, and fewer pregnancies in people under the age of 22.”

So, when you take your pill tonight, peel off your patch, or remember the IUD that has been your uterine companion for a few years, take a second to say thanks.

Endangered Species Condoms Are Not Actually For Endangered Species

Typos matter.

An article on a website called Treendeepro mostly copied a press release about the Center for Biodiversity sending endangered species condoms to the UN, but one altered word really did change the meaning.

Ahead of yesterday (November 15th), the day in which the Earth was expected to hit 8 billion people, the Center for Biodiversity sent the condoms to the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Environment Program, and the United Nations Secretary General “…to encourage the organization to talk about how continued unsustainable population growth negatively affects biodiversity.”   

Endangered species condoms are a funny marketing tool that have adorable pictures of animals and cute sayings on them like “before it gets hotter remember the sea otter” and “fumbling in the dark, think of the monarch.” They’ve been strategically sent to Congress, organizations in the 10 “most sexually satisfied” U.S. cities, zoos, college campuses, and elsewhere. The message for us humans is to think twice before reproducing as a way to save the planet.  

The mistake in the Treendepro article, however, suggests that the condoms are for endangered species, which is both counterintuitive and difficult to imagine given their lack of opposable thumbs. People should use condoms to prevent unintended pregnancy, but we would really like whooping cranes, polar bears, and homed lizards to start boffing like bunnies entirely unprotected.     

The Ministry of That’s Not How It F**king Works

In an effort to combat misinformation about sexual and reproductive health, Representatives Nikema Williams (GA), Sarah Jacobs (CA), Sylvia Garcia (TX), Barbara Lee (CA), and Veronica Escobar (TX)—all Democrats—have introduced legislation to create a new position within the Department of Health and Human Services. If it passes, the new Ombuds for Reproductive and Sexual Health will report directly to the Secretary of Health and be charged “making evidence-based, medically accurate educational materials available to the public.”

Specifically, the Ombuds will disseminate information about how individuals can access Title X providers, abortion funds, and other clinics. They will also provide the public with evidence-based and medically accurate information related to medication abortions conducted outside formal medical settings. The other part of the job would be collecting and addressing reproductive and sexual health misinformation that is being disseminated to the public and working with the Federal Trade Commission to see if there are consumer protection issues involved. 

This role sounds designed to take down Crisis Pregnancy Centers—the fake clinics that have been spreading lies about abortion for years while pretending to actually provide health care. It could also take down abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, now called sexual risk avoidance programs, which have been spreading lies about sex for years while pretending to be education. Whether it can take down the new Wild West of misinformation—Twitter under Elon Musk—is anyone’s guess.

Is this my dream job? Will they let me say f*ck? Maybe just on Wednesdays?