Cache Culture

The FDA does not allow women who are capable of becoming pregnant to take a powerful acne drug, Isotretinoin (Accutane), without jumping through stringent hoops.

For example, two negative pregnancy tests must be forthcoming before you can even think about getting a prescription.

After delivering your two negative sticks, entering name in the iPledge database, promise to use two forms of birth control and acknowledge that taking this prescription can cause birth defects (if the two forms of birth control or enjoying periods of abstinence doesn’t work) and admitting that thoughts of suicide are due to the ingested drugs, not the state of our culture, you get to have magazine skin.

The FDA has claimed that it’s program has produced no pregnancies (starting late December 2005 until late March 2006). Mandating that women take two kinds of birth control in order to consume a cosmetic drug is sadly ironic in our culture of shrinking choices. To be fair, this is the same agency that regulates tampons as medical devices.

Demanding such extraordinary corporeal policy while simultaneously shrinking women’s choices regarding their lives and bodies demonstrates the hypocrisy of a government that propagates “family values”.

This paternal ideology should be easy to spot, but like a bad pimple, it always seems to lie just beneath the observable skin. Alert the evangelistic – the FDA condones forced birth control. In fact this public policy acknowledges that in order to look good you need to be practicing safe sex. A rather radical notion in a state of controlled desires.

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