abortion pills by mail and the Comstock Act, etc.
A federal judge in Texas on Friday suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs commonly used to end a pregnancy, throwing the future of the drug into question.
The federal judge cited to the Comstock Act, dating from the 1870s, a federal law banning the use of the Postal Service or any other interstate delivery method for shipping drugs that cause abortions. The Comstock Act also banned shipping a variety of other items relating to sex or pregnancy, including contraceptives, sex toys, pornography, and even private letters containing sexual content. Basically, if the item you wanted to ship had anything to do with sex or pregnancy, federal law prohibited you from shipping it.
Many of the provisions of the Comstock Act have been ignored for decades because of evolving Constitutional protections and social mores. But this federal judge wrote on Friday that the Comstock Act should've forbidden the FDA from approving "prescribe-by-mail" status for mifepristone in 2021, and that the FDA ignored serious side effects when it initially approved the drug for inducing abortions in 2000 and thereafter.
This decision will likely be reviewed by higher courts, but with a more conservative judiciary I'd say it is difficult to predict where this lands. Some states also have 19th Century laws regarding abortion that have returned to life after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
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Liberals have felt for decades that "history is on our side" with respect to ever-more-liberal Supreme Court decisions on racial, sexual, gender, and reproductive issues. But Republicans got lucky with Trump's three appointments to the Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 Republican majority. And it is plausible that Republicans will also control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency after the 2024 elections. This country may lurch to the right later this decade in ways that liberals couldn't have imagined, because liberals imagined that history was on their side.
But if you study history from the long view, history is both cyclical and random, in that trends do not last forever and typically reverse, although not according to any particular schedule.
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It had seemed like average life expectancy in the US would keep rising forever, as it had risen during every 5-year period from 1920 to 2015, but then the combination of COVID plus rising drug overdoses and rising gun violence started to reduce our average life expectancy (the US now ranks 46th in life expectancy compared to other countries). Individual variables cannot keep rising forever. We may discover over the next decade or two that the rise of egalitarian legal and moral standards also could not keep going forever.
World population seems to have been growing without pause since around 1400 AD, since the Black Death. That's a long time, we may be overdue for a reversal. Global GDP growth has been jerkier, with frequent recessions, but has nevertheless been growing increasingly quickly for a few centuries now -- could we be nearing a peak for global GDP?
My job here is not to predict doom and gloom, but to point out that no trend can last forever. If you're imagining that the future always becomes more liberal, more populous, more productive, with longer lives -- history suggests a reversion to the mean is more typical than an everlasting upward trend. "Anatomically modern" humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for 97% of that time we didn't even have written history.
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I was thinking yesterday about how our modern system of education is so recent. Just within my lifetime the proportion of the adult population with college degrees in the US has gone from single digits to nearly 40%. The trend has been for our youth to spend more years in school learning more stuff, even though this becomes increasingly expensive, because our ongoing growth in GDP has required ever more specialization and productivity. Babies are not born able to program AI.
Stuffing so many more of our youth into college has nearly tripled the cost of college tuition/per student since 1980, after adjusting for inflation. Along the way, the government has covered less and less of this cost, dumping more of it onto students themselves via loans.
It would not surprise me if this were another trend to peak, if the population-at-large and the capitalist class both decided we've gone too far, that we don't need our youth to spend so long in classrooms before putting them to work.
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Mainly history teaches me to be skeptical of any long-running trend. Sure, the trend may continue. But it doesn't have to. Assuming every trend will continue forever is first-order thinking, linear thinking. There aren't many examples in the wild, or in history, of unbroken linear trends. More typical is that something expands until it begins running into its limits, and then it contracts back toward its niche. But when you have a new phenomenon that is growing, it can be difficult to predict when its limits will slow it down and reverse it. There were people worried in the 1970s about human population growth, and now we have twice as many people as back then. There were people worried in the 1970s about Peak Oil, and now we have 40% more oil production as back then.
People thought we had a tech stock bubble in 2000, but tech stocks were worth even 50% more (as compared to GDP) in 2021.
It seems that some unsustainable trends can last longer than people expect, whereas other times people don't even realize they're benefitting from unsustainable trends. No trend can continue in one direction forever, but they can continue past the point of recognizable absurdity.
I guess my main takeaway from history would be "don't be surprised" LOL.
The federal judge cited to the Comstock Act, dating from the 1870s, a federal law banning the use of the Postal Service or any other interstate delivery method for shipping drugs that cause abortions. The Comstock Act also banned shipping a variety of other items relating to sex or pregnancy, including contraceptives, sex toys, pornography, and even private letters containing sexual content. Basically, if the item you wanted to ship had anything to do with sex or pregnancy, federal law prohibited you from shipping it.
Many of the provisions of the Comstock Act have been ignored for decades because of evolving Constitutional protections and social mores. But this federal judge wrote on Friday that the Comstock Act should've forbidden the FDA from approving "prescribe-by-mail" status for mifepristone in 2021, and that the FDA ignored serious side effects when it initially approved the drug for inducing abortions in 2000 and thereafter.
This decision will likely be reviewed by higher courts, but with a more conservative judiciary I'd say it is difficult to predict where this lands. Some states also have 19th Century laws regarding abortion that have returned to life after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
-----
Liberals have felt for decades that "history is on our side" with respect to ever-more-liberal Supreme Court decisions on racial, sexual, gender, and reproductive issues. But Republicans got lucky with Trump's three appointments to the Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 Republican majority. And it is plausible that Republicans will also control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency after the 2024 elections. This country may lurch to the right later this decade in ways that liberals couldn't have imagined, because liberals imagined that history was on their side.
But if you study history from the long view, history is both cyclical and random, in that trends do not last forever and typically reverse, although not according to any particular schedule.
-----
It had seemed like average life expectancy in the US would keep rising forever, as it had risen during every 5-year period from 1920 to 2015, but then the combination of COVID plus rising drug overdoses and rising gun violence started to reduce our average life expectancy (the US now ranks 46th in life expectancy compared to other countries). Individual variables cannot keep rising forever. We may discover over the next decade or two that the rise of egalitarian legal and moral standards also could not keep going forever.
World population seems to have been growing without pause since around 1400 AD, since the Black Death. That's a long time, we may be overdue for a reversal. Global GDP growth has been jerkier, with frequent recessions, but has nevertheless been growing increasingly quickly for a few centuries now -- could we be nearing a peak for global GDP?
My job here is not to predict doom and gloom, but to point out that no trend can last forever. If you're imagining that the future always becomes more liberal, more populous, more productive, with longer lives -- history suggests a reversion to the mean is more typical than an everlasting upward trend. "Anatomically modern" humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for 97% of that time we didn't even have written history.
-----
I was thinking yesterday about how our modern system of education is so recent. Just within my lifetime the proportion of the adult population with college degrees in the US has gone from single digits to nearly 40%. The trend has been for our youth to spend more years in school learning more stuff, even though this becomes increasingly expensive, because our ongoing growth in GDP has required ever more specialization and productivity. Babies are not born able to program AI.
Stuffing so many more of our youth into college has nearly tripled the cost of college tuition/per student since 1980, after adjusting for inflation. Along the way, the government has covered less and less of this cost, dumping more of it onto students themselves via loans.
It would not surprise me if this were another trend to peak, if the population-at-large and the capitalist class both decided we've gone too far, that we don't need our youth to spend so long in classrooms before putting them to work.
-----
Mainly history teaches me to be skeptical of any long-running trend. Sure, the trend may continue. But it doesn't have to. Assuming every trend will continue forever is first-order thinking, linear thinking. There aren't many examples in the wild, or in history, of unbroken linear trends. More typical is that something expands until it begins running into its limits, and then it contracts back toward its niche. But when you have a new phenomenon that is growing, it can be difficult to predict when its limits will slow it down and reverse it. There were people worried in the 1970s about human population growth, and now we have twice as many people as back then. There were people worried in the 1970s about Peak Oil, and now we have 40% more oil production as back then.
People thought we had a tech stock bubble in 2000, but tech stocks were worth even 50% more (as compared to GDP) in 2021.
It seems that some unsustainable trends can last longer than people expect, whereas other times people don't even realize they're benefitting from unsustainable trends. No trend can continue in one direction forever, but they can continue past the point of recognizable absurdity.
I guess my main takeaway from history would be "don't be surprised" LOL.