Today’s Associated Press report [1] on the deposition testimony a former FDA commissioner sheds further light on the FDA’s extended and shameful failure to approve “Plan B,” the morning after pill. According to the recent testimony:
The Food and Drug Administration had intended to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B last year but delayed the move while determining how to limit those sales to women 17 and older — a process that should have wrapped up by now, the agency’s former chief testified.
Former FDA commissioner Lester Crawford, in a sworn statement, said he had reserved the right to decide whether to loosen the sales restrictions on the prescription-only emergency contraceptive pills. His account of that unusual and perhaps unprecedented move, given in a deposition over a lawsuit against the FDA, confirmed earlier testimony given by two senior agency officials who said he’d shut them out of the decision-making process.
But Crawford said his Aug. 26, 2005, announcement that the agency was delaying its decision on Plan B wasn’t a move toward denying over-the-counter sales. Instead, it was a bid for time to work out how to enforce restricting nonprescription sales to women 17 and older. Girls 16 and younger would still need a prescription.
It is now more than two years since the FDA’s controversial decision denying Plan B emergency (EC) contraception over-the-counter status. Why is it important that EC is available? According to Planned Parenthood, [2]
Emergency contraception pills contain hormones that reduce the risk of pregnancy if started within 120 hours of unprotected intercourse. The sooner EC is administered after unprotected sex, the better it works, making timely access critically important.
The FDA, stocked with Bush appointees, has refused to approve Plan B for over the counter status, contrary to the recommendations of virtually all major medical and health care organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Further, EC meets all of the FDA’s own requirements for over-the-counter status. [2] The FDA’s stalling was repugnant back in 2004 [3] and it remains repugnant today.
Just to make clear: Plan B is not about abortion. It’s about preventing pregnancy. Oh, I know there are people out there who work hard to confuse these two concepts, people who claim that a person causes an abortion if that person completely prevents an egg that might be fertilized from implanting in a uterus. I’m a bit old-fashioned in my thinking, though. I prefer to think that there can’t be an abortion unless there is first a pregnancy. In my old-fashioned way of thinking, then, Plan B has nothing to do with abortions because Plan B prevents pregnancies.
The above-described deposition testimony is further evidence that the official position of this administration is to encourage numerous unplanned pregnancies, especially among teenaged girls younger than 17. Yes, this means that this administration wants to force raped women to carry their rapists’ babies, especially those women who lack easy access to a doctor. Every year, an estimated 25,000 U.S. woman are impregnated by their rapists [4]. Ninety percent of these rape pregnancies can be prevented [5] with the prompt use of the morning after pill.
In light of the health care cuts authored by this administration, this administration’s unconscionable birth control policies will force unwanted babies on women without properly providing for the medical care of the women or the babies.
If men were able to get pregnant, our government would have passed laws 30 years ago allowing Plan B to be sold out of vending machines in every supermarket, every tattoo shop, and every restaurant or tavern. If men could get pregnant, even Justice Scalia would have been able to latch onto that penumbra of Constitutional rights guaranteeing men’s access to the a male version of Plan B. It would just be that obvious.
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