India has a rather novel idea to curb overpopulation—late-night TV! Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad wants the country to increase efforts to bring electricity to the country’s rural areas in the hopes that watching late-night TV will kill the libidos of this huge population and discourage procreation. “If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep,” Azad argued. “When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies.” India’s population grows about 1.6 percent annually and accounts for about 17 percent of the world population even though the country makes up only 3 percent of the Earth’s land. Azad said 80 percent of India’s population growth can be reduced by TV, which is a great medium to combat the problem. [Impact Lab]

Kudos to India for increasing its effort to bring electricity to rural areas (it’s only 2009, after all), but wouldn’t more conventional approaches like, you know, sex education and contraceptives, prove more effective in fighting overpopulation?

It’s a good thing abstinence-only advocates are tweaking their message, because the old one didn’t seem to be working. According to a study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Guttmacher Institute, teens’ contraceptive use declined 10 percent from 2003 to 2007, but their level of sexual activity remained the same. The study’s authors believe the findings suggest a link between the decrease in contraceptive use and the rise in abstinence-only education during former President George W. Bush’s administration. Unsurprisingly, the proportion of births to unmarried women also saw an increase. [Medical News Today]

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the FDA to make the Plan B morning-after birth control pill available without a prescription to women 17 and up. In a very crime show-sounding ruling, the court said, “The FDA repeatedly and unreasonably delayed issuing a decision on Plan B for suspect reasons.” How sordid! Apparently, the FDA only considered a petition about Plan B when Congress threatened to hold up FDA commissioners’ confirmation hearings. And, the FDA ignored it’s own advisory panel and scientists, who found that Plan B could be safely used by 17-year-olds. Keep reading for five things you should know about the morning-after pill, no matter what your age. [NY Times, Reuters]

DMC Pharmacy in Chantilly, Virginia, will sell everything from cold meds to contact solution when it opens this summer, but if you want condoms, birth control pills, or any other form of contraception, you’d better head in the other direction. The “pro-life pharmacy” sticks to a strict policy of not offering its patrons contraception or anything else that “interferes” with the procreation process. Virginia doesn’t have laws which require pharmacists to dispense prescriptions written by a physician, but luckily, there are at least five other pharmacies (pro-choice ones, we guess!) within spitting distance. [Washington Post]