Disappointing news from Chile: on Friday, the Constitutional Court voted 6-4 to shut down a program that made the morning-after pill available free of charge to all Chilean women over 14. The Court's ruling came in response to a petition sent by 32 right-wing legislators who claimed that the pill violates parents' right to educate their children and fetuses' right to life. Their proposed plan for addressing the fact that 14 in 100 Chilean adolescents are sexually active by the age of 14, and 130,000 unsafe, illegal abortions that take place every year? Oh, wait, that's right. They don't have one.

Medically, the fetal-right-to-life argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense in this case, since the morning-after pill doesn't involve fetuses in any way, shape, or form: it can prevent pregnancy from occurring if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected intercourse, but it doesn't work if you're already pregnant. Maybe they're thinking of RU-486, the abortion pill, which is already totally illegal in Chile, along with any other kind of abortion, including abortion to save a woman's life. Or maybe they're deliberately confusing the morning-after pill and the abortion pill, a political tactic commonly used by right-wing groups to further muddy the waters where access to accurate, unbiased reproductive health information is already hard to come by. Or maybe it's all the same in these legislators' eyes—abortion, the morning-after bill, the birth control pill, women having sex period—ban it all, ask questions later. These are, after all, the same legislators who voted without debate in November to reject the legalization of therapeutic abortion up to 12 weeks, even though 32,000 Chilean wind up in the hospital as a result of complications from unsafe, illegal abortions every year.

In the case of the morning-after pill, the Court's ruling focused on procedural technicalities rather than parental and fetal issues, claiming that the program was unconstitutional because it had been passed by administrative, rather than presidential, decree. Some are speculating that Chilean President Michelle Bachelet will issue a decree in response: she supported the original program, highlighting that the pill's cost (13,000 Chilean pesos, or about $24) put it out of many Chilean women's reach. I just hope she doesn't compromise by leaving adolescent girls out in the cold like the FDA did in order to get the morning-after pill made available over the counter in the United States.

Regardless of what Bachelet decides, it's going to be an uphill battle, since ideology, not reality, is primarily what's at stake here. Chilean right-wing leaders, supported by the powerful Catholic Church, have vowed to fight the pill at every turn, since removing an effective method of reducing unsafe abortion rates in a country where abortion is completely illegal is obviously a top national priority. Seriously, don't these people have anything better to do?