A Symbol of Sex Without Mystery

From a purely intellectual standpoint, selling the “morning-after” pill known as Plan B over the counter certainly seems like a sensible and laudable thing to do. Women’s reproductive rights are embattled now, and anything that gives women more power over their own bodies should be applauded. Unlike the abortion pill known as RU-486, the Plan B pill doesn’t cause a miscarriage, it actually prevents pregnancy. With so many unwanted babies born, we should be grateful that a remedy should be so easily accessible.

But some part of me is put off by the image of the Plan B pill alongside toothpaste and cough syrup, boxes adorned with pictures of rumpled sheets and chipper labels reading “Made a mistake? Don’t worry!” There is something in the image that seems irreverent.

It’s not surprising that someone came up with a pill for drunken, careless nights; after all, there is a pill for everything else. But what our culture needs most may not be another way to distance our bodies from biology, to make conception even more of an afterthought than it already is.

In some ways, the Plan B pill is a more powerful force for hedonism than abortion; you don’t even have to think about the baby you may have created. You don’t ever have to know if a reckless moment led to the joining of cells or would have. You don’t have to grapple with the ambiguities of reproductive power. You can forget that having sex has consequences any more dire than a sore throat.

You can put it all out of your mind.

Of course this is a vast improvement over the days when young women were forced to get married and give up their education for the pleasures of a single evening. I wouldn’t dispute that.

But at this point the Plan B pill may be something akin to a recreational drug -- an aid to the casual disregard with which we treat our bodies.

Reading stories from the 1950s and early 1960s -- Brodkey or Updike or Roth -- even the most casual sexual encounters have a tremulous profundity, a meaning that our sexual encounters lack. Where is the awe, the weight of our most intimate engagements? Where does it come from if not the smallest danger of procreation? The frisson of possibility? Is it in our best interests to sever the sexual act even further from its consequences?

I’ve read that, in this country, adolescence currently lasts until age 28, and in some of our cities it’s probably more like 34. We’ve pushed the limits as far as we can. We live without responsibility for as long as we can.

These days, it’s so easy not to have a baby, not to consider the possibility that what you are doing could lead to the creation of a life, that some of us may have almost lost touch with the fact that sex can in fact lead to the creation of a life. And that the life we have the power to create, however right thinking or feminist our politics, is precious.

The idea of pregnancy is so abstract that by the time some women reach their late 30s they are shocked to find that they have squandered their childbearing years.

In real terms, the Plan B pill will probably make little difference to a population that takes its freedoms for granted. Our sexual lives are already so divorced from biological imperatives that it’s hard to imagine them becoming more so.

But as a symbol, do we really need Plan B pills in our drugstore aisles to aid our disposable attitude toward physical intimacy?

Do we need an easy remedy for regret?

Will we benefit from making casual encounters easier than they already are?

Before the “morning-after” pill becomes as common as aspirin, perhaps we should know the mystery and richness of the night before.

Katie Roiphe is the author of “Still She Haunts Me,” a novel (Delta, 2002).