As we’ve seen on too many occasions, Friday afternoons are frequently used to release embarrassing information that the Bush gang would like to keep relatively hidden from public view — fewer reporters are working and fewer Americans are paying attention. Alas, this past Friday afternoon was no exception.
After 28 months of growing controversy, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday indefinitely postponed its decision on whether women should be allowed to buy the “morning-after pill” Plan B without a prescription — despite earlier assurances that it would act by Thursday.
The decision to embark instead on a new regulation-writing process was immediately denounced by women’s health advocates and some lawmakers as a stalling tactic to achieve political and ideological ends.
This is absurd. Nearly two years ago, an FDA panel voted 23 to 4 to approve over-the-counter access to this emergency contraception pill. It’s not the more controversial RU-486 you may have heard about; we’re just talking about emergency contraception — nothing more than high-dose birth-control pills — that reduces the chance of pregnancy 75% to 90%, but only if taken within 72 hours of sex. One FDA panel member called it the “safest drug that we have seen brought before us.”
But as is usually the case with this administration, politics has trumped science.
Many social and religious conservatives oppose easier access to emergency contraception and have flooded the White House with their views in recent days. Some oppose the easier access because they believe it will encourage promiscuity among young girls, and others because they believe emergency contraception can be a form of abortion.
The far right has everything backwards.
Plan B’s availability offers a relatively easy way to drastically reduce the number of abortions in the country without undermining women’s legal reproductive rights. And yet, conservatives are against abortion and against taking any steps — emergency contraception, accurate education on sexual health, support for family planning programs — that might make abortions less common, even for women who’ve been assaulted.
The right says Plan B may not be safe, but medical experts here and around the world say otherwise. The right says Plan B is tantamount to abortion, but if a fertilized egg doesn’t get implanted in the uterus, the woman can’t get pregnant. The right says Plan B might promote risky sexual behavior, but peer-reviewed studies published in mainstream medical publications repeatedly found no such link.
Making emergency contraception available without a prescription in Britain did not lead women there to rely on it rather than other birth control methods or to an increase in unprotected sex, a new study has found.
The three-year study of more than 20,000 women found that over-the-counter availability had little effect. About the same percentage of women used the emergency contraceptive before and after it become more easily available in January 2001 — about 8 percent annually.
The researchers concluded that fears that nonprescription emergency contraception would change contraceptive practices were unfounded, as were hopes it would reduce unwanted pregnancies.
And yet, he we are, with Bush’s FDA breaking its word and delaying the decision again. The entire process has been a painfully ridiculous example of ideological foot-dragging, as conservatives search desperately for creative ways to deny reality.
Under federal regulations, the Food and Drug Administration was required to reach a decision on Plan B by January. Nothing happened. Indeed, Barr executives said they had no discussions with the agency after January. Usually when the agency is actively considering an application, there is a constant back-and-forth with the company.
As the months passed, two Democratic senators who support abortion rights, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington, vowed to block any vote on President Bush’s nomination of Dr. Crawford to become agency commissioner unless the F.D.A. made a decision on the pill, for or against. Mr. Bush has long been aligned with abortion opponents.
The senators relented in July after the secretary of health and human services, Michael O. Leavitt, promised that a decision would be made by Sept. 1. On Friday, both senators attributed Dr. Crawford’s latest announcement to political interference.
Dr. Robert Fenichel, a former deputy division director for cardiovascular and renal drugs who left the F.D.A. in 2000, agreed, saying the agency’s decisions on Plan B were being driven by abortion politics.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Dr. Fenichel said.
It’s funny how often we hear that phrase in the context of the Bush gang, isn’t it?