This is the sound of time moving backwards

I just wrote a letter - an actual paper letter, to mail to a friend. I wrote it out by hand, put it in an envelope, addressed it, and stuck a stamp on it. Then it occured to me that that means it won't be recieved for what, a week? Huh.

Second order of business: In response to my previous post about WalMart, Ouroboros writes:

Go ladies! After a night of unprotected casual sex, you expect the corporate bogeyman of America to have your contraceptives, dammit!

I have a few responses to that, my dear buddy. For one: You have absolutely no idea and therefore no right to say that a woman seeking the morning-after pill had unprotected sex. Maybe the condom broke. Maybe she was raped. The point is: you don't know, and it's not particularly nice or intelligent to make judgements in ignorance.

Two: Regardless of how you feel about the ethical implications of this particular drug, the issue still stands: it's a medication (some could easily say an emergency medication: if a woman has a condition that makes pregnancy dangerous, but somehow slips up, she could need this medication), and a pharmacy is morally obligated to stock it. If you had strep throat, would it be acceptable for the pharmacist to say, 'nope, sorry, we're just fresh out of amoxicillin'? If someone had asthma and went in to get their fast-acting inhaler refilled, would it be acceptable for them to 'not have it in stock'? What about my grandmothers heart medication? Surely she could have prevented developing this condition if she were more carefuly (she smoked her whole life just about, probably never watched what she ate as much as she could have). How about vicodan for someone who lives with chronic pain - would you be upset if they didn't have that in stock?

You can't have double standards in medicine. Those in the medical field are obligated to help those who come to them. Of course this means trying to save lives, but also to alleviate pain and suffering, and improve the quality of life. If a woman doesn't want to be pregnant, then that's between her and her doctor, and not a single other person has the right to involve themselves in that.