Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Plan B

I'll take Plan C, thanks

One of the interesting things that happened at Planned Parenthood was that the nurse practitioner said "you know about Plan B, right?" and I said I did, even though it was kind of a lie because I'd only seen the advertisements, where funky "cool" looking girls wake up in their studio apartments panicked and scowling, grab their hoodies and run to the nearest gynecologist to take Plan B, the idea being that they're scowling because they were drunk as a skunk the night before and had sex with some random dude and woke up convinced they were pregnant, so they had to go and get some Plan B. However, the Plan B commercial stresses "Plan B is not the abortion pill" which seems like an outright lie, because why would people be running to get it the morning after if it wasn't actually doing anything.

So today I went home and looked up just what the hell Plan B actually was. The FAQs say: " You can use Plan B® after you've had unprotected sex one or more times in the last 72 hours (3 days), and you don't want to become pregnant," and then says "Plan B won't work if you're already pregnant" at the time you take the pills. Ok, so this means that if you had a one night stand and got pregnant during that one night stand, tough shit, but if somehow you were not impregnated during the actual sex, but somehow the sperm were miraculously preserved in Igloo coolers so that four weeks later while you were on the elliptical trainer minding your own business you became pregnant, then Plan B is for you. If you believe in miracles, Plan B is for you.

Further investigation into the Plan B ingredients list reveals Pez, Splenda, Skittles and pieces of the True Cross.

3 comments:

rachsky said...

I think the idea is that sperm can live in you for 72 hour. You don't become pregnant the minute you have sex, so the pill protects you from getting pregers. As far as it not working on you if you're already pregnant, they mean if you're 3 weeks in and want an abortion.

Either way, always wrap that shit up.

Unknown said...

Oy Marin, where do I begin? Conception can take place up to 72 hours after sex. This means the sperm are "hanging out" waiting for an egg to present itself. So Plan B works by preventing the sperm from fertilizing the egg and creating an embryo. Glad to see you paid attention in sex ed.

Milan said...

Um, it's not the abortion pill because it prevents implantation. Not a bad deal.