Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Plan B and Personal Responsibility

Good news in the fight against teen pregnancy: The FDA is making to it easier for young people to get morning-after pills.

Here's the FDA's announcement:

On March 23, 2009, a federal court issued an order directing the FDA, within 30 days, to permit the Plan B drug sponsor to make Plan B available to women 17 and older without a prescription. The government will not appeal this decision. In accordance with the court's order, and consistent with the scientific findings made in 2005 by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research,  FDA notified the manufacturer of Plan B informing the company that it may, upon submission and approval of an appropriate application, market Plan B without a prescription to women 17 years of age and older.

The New York Times warns that Plan B won't solve the problem:

Contraception advocates have pushed for easy access to Plan B for girls and women of all ages because the longer a woman delays in taking the medicine after unprotected sex, the more likely she will become pregnant. Eliminating doctors from the transactions, it was hoped, would lead to far fewer pregnancies and abortions. Indeed, advocates once predicted that widespread and easy access to emergency contraceptives would cut the number of induced abortions in half and slash teenage birth rates. But young people in the United States have so much unprotected sex—one in three girls under the age of 20 will get pregnant, with 80 percent of the pregnancies unplanned—that Plan B has been little more than a sandbag on an overtopped flood wall. Even women who are given the medicine free often fail to take it after having unprotected sex. "This is not going to be a cheap cure to the unintended pregnancy epidemic in this country," said James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.

Trussell has made the same point before: Emergency contraception has

not reduced unintended pregnancies in America or anywhere else that has introduced it. There is so much unprotected sex you would have to use so much emergency contraception to make a dent. ... It is not a magic bullet. If you want to seriously reduce unintended pregnancies in the UK you can only do [that] with implants and IUDs.

Why implants and IUDs? Because you don't have to think about them. They bypass the most common cause of what we erroneously call contraceptive failure: our own failure to use contraceptives properly and consistently.

I agree that using implants to bypass human failure is the most effective way to prevent unintended pregnancies. But that's no excuse for tolerating our failure in the first place. Emergency contraception, taken promptly after sex, can be (though you shouldn't rely on it) a magic bullet. But bullets don't work unless you fire them. Technology requires human agency.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, makes precisely this point about the FDA's decision: "Providing birth control, including emergency birth control, to young women helps them make responsible decisions and avoid unintended pregnancy."

The FDA hasn't solved the problem of unintended pregnancy. It has given you one more means to solve it. Go get your emergency contraception, now. And while you're at it, ask about an implant, so you won't have to count on a last-minute pill to bail you out. The responsibility is yours.

Tyranny and Technology

What's worse than an 11^th-century theocracy running a 21^st-century country? A theocracy that enforces its edicts with the help of 21^st-century technology.

The country is Iran; the religion is fundamentalist Islam; the technology is cell phone cameras. The report comes from an Iranian newspaper, Vatan-e-Emrooz, via the Associated Press:

The first mixed soccer game—females vs. males—since the 1979 Islamic revolution led to swift punishment Monday, as an Iranian soccer club said it had suspended three officials involved and handed out fines of up to $5,000. Iran's strict Islamic rules ban any physical contact between unrelated men and women, and Iranian women are even banned from attending soccer games when male teams play. ... [The club] said its disciplinary committee suspended two officials for a year while a third was suspended for six months.

How were the women's libbers behind this outrage caught? Allah be praised, by modern handheld electronics.

The officials—a coach and two managers—first denied the game took place, but video clips on cell phones of the game were used as evidence against them, the daily newspaper reported.

For much of the past century, there's been a running debate over whether economic liberalization leads to political liberalization. Then the globalization and democratization of communications technology were supposed to help. Last year, President Bush authorized exports of cell phones to Cuba, thinking this would loosen the regime's grip. "If the Cuban people can be trusted with mobile phones, they should be trusted to speak freely in public," he argued.

It's a nice thought. But as the Iranian case illustrates, democratized technology can be used just as easily to enforce tyranny as to challenge it. Devices won't point us in the right direction. We'll have to be the ones who point them.

Tunnel Vision

When I left the political beat to start writing about science and technology, I had hoped to get away from the polarization, oversimplification, and shouting that infests much of the blogosphere. So it's disappointing to see those bad habits creeping into technology journalism, particularly in a Slate family publication.

Last week, three people at Slate researched possible technological means of detecting and blocking tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. We put together a summary of the options with their pros and cons.

The next day, our sister publication, Foreign Policy, published a blog post ridiculing the list as "really terrible advice—almost a parody of the worst sort of technocentric thinking that military reformers like H.R. McMaster have been fighting against for decades." The post, by FP's Web editor, Blake Hounshell, went on:

There's a sad history of people who don't understand—or, for political reasons, pretend not to understand—why technology won't solve their political, economic, and social problems. Take Robert McNamara, who in 1967 announced plans for a massive, ill-conceived "electronic anti-infiltration barrier" to stop inflitration [sic] of men and materiel from North Vietnam. Or take the moronic "virtual fence" that some in the U.S. government concoted [sic] to address illegal immigration ...

Terrible, parody, worst, moronic. This is the way many bloggers write today, especially when they don't understand or don't wish to acknowledge the complexity of the subject. They come to each item of news or analysis with a preconceived agenda—in this case, the perils of "technocentric thinking"—and treat the item before them as an occasion to repeat their shtick.

What gets lost in the shtick is the actual material at hand. The Slate article can't be "really terrible advice," since it recommended no particular approach. Nor can it be "the worst sort of technocentric thinking," since it said nothing about whether technology was preferable to political or economic proposals for resolving the Gaza conflict. The exact sentence that introduced our list of ideas was: "Here are some of the options."

Hounshell thinks economic remedies make more sense. You can't shut down the tunnels, he argues, "until you permit free trade in and out of Gaza, end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raise income levels in northern Sinai, and pay Egyptian officials high enough wages such that they don't feel the need to take bribes. There is no technological solution, so best of luck with the rest of it."

There's no contradiction, of course, between closing the tunnels and opening the borders to trade. To me, that's the logical combination. People in Gaza need and deserve the same goods as people anywhere else. What they don't need is missile parts. For the last couple of years, missile parts going into Gaza have brought nothing but grief, first to Israelis, and now to Gazans. The best way to separate Gaza's consumer-goods traffic from its weapons traffic is to bring the former to the surface, out of the tunnels. But that alone won't stop the weapons traffic. Hamas wants weapons and has the money and sponsors to get them. If it can't smuggle them in by surface routes, it will seek them underground. To patrol and block the underground channels, technology has to be part of the solution.

That's how technology fits a messy problem like Gaza. It's seldom the whole answer, but it's usually part of the answer. Just ask Israelis about their "security fence" against suicide bombers from the West Bank. It's not a solution by itself—lasting peace requires political and economic progress for Palestinians—but it has sharply reduced the bombings. And reducing the bombings has improved prospects for political progress between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

So let's ease up on the invective against technocentrism. Technology is more complicated than that. At its best, so is journalism.