Logic Missing from Plan B Debate

In the end, everyone blew it. The arguments were flying fast
and furious in the wake of
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s
decision to prevent Plan B, the morning after pill as it is sometimes referred
to, from being sold over the counter to young women under the age of 17. The
problem is that they were all bad arguments. Indeed, each of the players in
this debate committed at least one textbook fallacy

Let’s start with the Secretary’s reasoning. Her main
argument was that allowing the drug to be purchased over the counter by any
minor would open up the possibility of a 12-year-old girl, who might not fully
understand the instructions, using the drug without supervision and potentially
harming herself. This is a classic slippery slope, the contention that an
extreme situation will result from adopting your opponent’s view. Like asserting
that once we allow gay marriage we open the door to sanctioning bestiality, the
Secretary’s reasoning fails to recognize there is a logical stopping point in
the slide. In this case, it was possible for the Secretary reject allowing sale
of the drug to 12-year-olds but to come out in favor of making it available for
older teens.

Her critics on the Left didn’t fare any better. Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum asserted
that this was the first time in history that the HHS Secretary has overruled a
recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration. Let’s not commit a tu quoque
fallacy ourselves by dismissing his claim because it is inconsistent with a
past position, since progressives would have had no problem with an HHS
Secretary overruling the FDA during the Bush administration. But we should
charge him and others who repeat this claim with the fallacy of tradition,
since they are guilty of asserting as reasonable the proposition that just
because something has been a certain way in the past it should continue to stay
that way. Following this line of thought, women would not have the right to
vote nor interracial couples the right to marry.

Finally we have the strange bedfellow moment of the week,
with the conservative Family Research Council praising an Obama appointee’s
decision. The only problem is that they ruined this rare moment of political
harmony by going off the logical deep end. In the fallacy of irrelevance, one
introduces information which, though interesting, has no bearing on the matter
at hand. This is what has to be said of the Council’s effort to bring the topic
of sexual trafficking into the Plan B debate.
Their concern that young women who are the victims of sex trafficking
could get the pill if it were legal overlooks the fact that the very people who
are doing the sex trafficking are probably old enough to go out and buy the
pill themselves. Sex trafficking is a serious topic, and you do its victims a
disservice by bringing it into an issue with which it has no logical
connection.

Fallacies can be defined as arguments that should not persuade rational
agents. In this polarized political environment, these seem to be in short
supply