It is for women who can get pregnant, and not the middle-aged, to campaign for the morning-after pill

The manufactured debate on the morning-after pill is dominated entirely by people who can’t get pregnant and who are unlikely to get somebody else pregnant: women who are way past child-bearing age, and middle-aged or elderly men. I find this a little strange. Where are the young women, the ones who will actually need, want and use the morning-after pill?

Campaigns are the prerogative of those who have a stake in the matter. Of course, others can and should join in, if they feel strongly enough, to support those who have a vested interest. But they should always be aware that theirs is a supporting role.

In this case, those with a stake in the matter, other than the importers who will be selling the pills, are girls in their teens and women in their 20s and 30s, and the men who are their contemporaries and who have a primary role to play, as it is not the Holy Ghost who does it. Girls in their teens are not known campaigners, but women in their 20s and 30s have no excuse. For everybody else, quite simply, it’s a battle that is not ours to fight.

If the debate were led by women in their 20s and 30s and the older women simply joined in to back them up, that would be fine. But when a campaign for the morning-after pill is started and dominated by middle-aged women who won’t be getting pregnant any time soon, let alone by accident, it’s more than a little weird. And to make it weirder still, you have all these middle-aged men chiming in to oppose them.

This is the NOT the equivalent of campaigning for the rights of refugees, homeless children or other vulnerable members of society who cannot do it for themselves and who need others to do it for them. It is not the equivalent, either, of campaigning for divorce legislation even if you are not interested in getting a divorce yourself and may not even be married. This is, literally, a special-interest matter.

Women in their teens, 20s and 30s, and their boyfriends, are not a vulnerable social group and they are perfectly capable of campaigning to have the ban on the importation of the morning-after pill lifted. They don’t need older women to do it for them. If they couldn’t be bothered to do it themselves, good luck to them. They’re the ones who are going to have to cope with the result of their inaction.

Women who will never get pregnant again should not take it upon themselves to do so on their behalf, and all those middle-aged and elderly men should stay out of it too, unless they’re planning on getting some woman young enough to be their daughter pregnant. The sight and sound of a bunch of middle-aged women campaigning for a pill they will never need themselves, while patronisingly assuming that those women who do need it are incapable of doing any campaigning in their own interest, is just so unseemly and ridiculous.

One of the reasons that older women should stay out of it is that they are stuck in another era and make the standard mistake of seeing this as a women’s issue or something to do with women’s rights. It isn’t. Contraception, pregnancy and babies were seen as women’s business back in the 1960s and 1970s, but they no longer are. This is 2016 and not 1966.

The morning-after pill is a young people’s issue – men and women, both – and women my age should stay out of it. Men my age should stay out of it even more. You never saw any of them running around with prams and nappies.

Talking about the morning-after pill when you’re in your late 40s or 50s is going to fool nobody into thinking you’re in danger of needing it any time soon. Let the younger women get on with it themselves. The proper stance for middle-aged women is to be thoroughly bored of the subject on a been there, done that, yawn yawn yawn basis. Women of 50 should be talking about geopolitical issues, not contraceptive pills.