According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, if you live in Ohio, you are 15% more likely to die of heart disease than the average American.
You are also 11% more likely to die of cancer than the average American.
Accidents are even worse. Ohioans are 40% more likely to die of an accident than the average American.
Respiratory disease, cerebrovascular disease like stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney disease, suicide, homicide, pneumonia, sepsis: Ohioans die of all of these conditions at higher rates than the average American. The only categories highlighted by the National Institutes of Health that Ohioans don’t die of at higher rates than the general U.S. population are liver disease (2% lower) and the flu (exactly the same).
Given the public nature of this information, public health-minded policymakers would be crafting a strategy to address this rampant mortality. There are so many fronts on which progress could be made, where valuable political capital could be spent to save lives.
Earlier this week, a bipartisan coalition of legislators joined with the governor to introduce their big public health push for 2024. Was it a package to tackle heart disease? Cancer? Are policymakers going to craft a plan to tackle respiratory disease, strokes, diabetes? Maybe suicide or homicide?
No. Public enemy #1 in Ohio is porn.
Executive and legislative leaders joined together to introduce legislation to require all viewers of pornographic material in the state to share personal information such as a state ID online to do so. Some legislators have already been trying for years to declare a “public health crisis” around consumption of pornography in Ohio.
If Ohio passed this legislation, they would join a handful of bible belt states, Montana, and Utah in requiring residents to share their personal information to access pornographic material.
There seems to be some evidence that pornography could have impacts on the health of some individuals and could have some impacts on social norms around sex and sexuality.
But why has pornography risen to such a fixation of policymakers across the United States?
Emily F. Rothman, Professor of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, is a foremost researcher on the impact of pornography on public health. She wrote the 2021 textbook Pornography and Public Health.
In this book, Rothman outlines how out of step policymakers are with public health leadership.
The professional public health community is not behind the recent push to declare pornography a public health crisis. One might think that if pornography is a public health menace, “destroying the lives of millions,” public health entities and professional societies must have a viewpoint on the topic, perhaps a clearly outlined health-promotion agenda related to the problem, and a strategic plan. At least one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must have named it as a priority, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must have a branch devoted to putting a stop to it, and the World Health Organization must have at least one infographic on its harms. But none of these things exists or has happened. In fact, there is no public health professional presently in any position of public health leadership or authority who has gone on record to say pornography is a public health topic of interest–let alone a public health crisis. In 2016, in a written statement to CNN, the CDC said it “does not have an established position on pornography as a public health issue. Pornography can be connected to other public health issues like sexual violence and occupational HIV transmission.” But if public health entities are not behind the movement to declare pornography a public health problem, who is? And why are they using the language of public health for their cause?
Maybe policymakers are way ahead of the public health community on this one. But I’ll say this: if they spent as much time trying to reduce cigarette consumption as they spent on pornography, they would probably save a lot more lives.