Dear Editor,
Recent Daily Northwestern opinion pieces have discussed a Norris University Center reproductive, or “sexual health,” vending machine that will dispense Plan B One-Step for emergency contraception.
Two opinion pieces, the first by Sahil Desai and the second by Francesca and Gabriel Bayer, typify opposing viewpoints. Although classified by the Food and Drug Administration as contraception and not abortion, Plan B One-Step touches on similar issues pertaining to the abortion debate. Several points should be considered.
Funding for Plan B One-Step requires transparency. Evan Hostetler, co-chair of the Associated Student Government Health and Wellness committee, previously told The Daily students will receive free products after swiping their Wildcards.
The ASG Student Activities Finance Committee allocates funding to student organizations based on quarterly student activity fees. Desai suggested the Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators student organization has a major role in supporting the vending machine.
If Plan B One-Step funding is derived from student activity fees, serious conflicts are raised. Students who believe “life begins at conception,” such as Bayer and Bayer, are placed in the position where their student activity fees fund an activity they not only disagree with, but fundamentally believe terminates life.
Desai, SHAPE’s director, stated that Plan B One-Step “prevents or delays ovulation, preventing conception in the first place” and believes that emergency contraception is not abortion. They used the American Medical Association as an example of an “eminent medical organization” that guides SHAPE’s recommendations.
The AMA publishes the JAMA Health Forum journal. An editorial published in the August 4, 2023 issue discussed the FDA decision on December 23, 2022 to declare Plan B One-Step, or single-dose 1.5 mg levonorgestel, as a nonabortifacient.
One would be hard-pressed to find a more qualified trio of authors. Dr. Eli Adashi, an obstetrician and gynecologist, is the former Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences at Brown University. Glenn Cohen is Deputy Dean of Harvard Law School and advised Kamala Harris on reproductive rights when she was Vice President of the United States. Dr. Allen Wilcox is the former head of the Reproductive Epidemiology Group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
They stated, “the question of whether levonorgestrel might act as an abortifacient … is particularly difficult to resolve because the human ovum is not directly observable from the time of its fertilization to the time the blastocyst implants in the lining of the uterus, roughly 9 days later.”
They concluded that research from indirect strategies “lands on the side of levonorgestrel as a contraceptive and not as an abortifacient.” However, they admitted that “the caveat, of course, is that in addition to averting ovulation, levonorgestrel might in theory also affect subsequent development in ways that are not yet detectable.”
In other words, our current understanding is that Plan B One-Step does not induce abortion, as currently defined, but future research could change that paradigm.
Furthermore, acquiring Plan B One-Step from a vending machine with a Wildcard raises privacy concerns. According to Hostetler, student use will be tracked to prevent resale. Any assurance of absolute confidentiality would be low as healthcare data breaches are common.
Protected health information is covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 to prevent unwanted disclosure. HIPAA does not apply to over-the-counter medications and would not apply to vending machine products. Paying cash at a pharmacy is a better option to ensure privacy.
Finally, the importance of dialogue needs to be stressed. SHAPE’s website discloses no political agenda. Yet, Desai declined to be interviewed by a fellow NU student journalist because of a supposed conservative agenda to “demonize SHAPE” and subsequently described problems with the final article. It is difficult to sympathize with the claim that SHAPE’s Plan B One-Step initiatives were intentionally negatively portrayed when Desai passed on an opportunity to defend them.
Open communication is a means to combat personal anti-intellectual tendencies. Before becoming a Supreme Court Justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg was critical of Roe v. Wade, writing, “heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” Such positions can only be considered if we sincerely, as Desai stated, “choose science and professionalism over zealotry in our decision-making.”
NU has a polarized student body with over 78% identifying politically as somewhat or very liberal, according to the Daily’s Fall 2025 poll. Extreme political environments, which do not reflect the more balanced American population, limit the assessment of potential benefits and risks of healthcare initiatives on campus.
Norman C. Wang, MD, MS
Norman C. Wang is an alumnus of the McCormick School of Engineering, class of 1994, and a graduate of the Feinberg School of Medicine, class of 1998. He is currently an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a practicing clinical cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
