Safety at forefront of decision
Last year the Food and Drug Administration made the controversial but correct decision to continue requiring a prescription for the morning-after pill–after an FDA advisory panel had initially agreed, with lobbying by the drug’s makers, that it be available over the counter. Because the morning-after pill, or Plan B, is just a higher dose of regular birth control pills, and no one was arguing that those be available without prescription, it seemed odd that the advisory panel would have even contemplated over-the-counter availability.
Predictably, abortion-rights activists were outraged at the switch, saying politics was meddling in medicine. Yet while a General Accounting Office investigation agreed it was unusual for FDA higher-ups to countermand an advisory panel decision, it found no evidence of political meddling.
This topic has generated massive press attention, but almost every reporter is missing the real story. In fact, it is the Plan B proponents–not the FDA–who are making a medical issue a political one.
These government advisory panels are composed of outside members, not FDA staff. And in this case, those outside members included several well-known abortion activists. Gee, I can’t imagine why they would be eager for Plan B to be available without a prescription.
It is those members– not the FDA higher-ups–who are playing politics with women’s lives.
Further, FDA higher-ups had access to several critical facts that weren’t available when the panel met, including a British study that shows STDs skyrocketing into a true public-health crisis after the morning-after pill became available without a prescription.
It’s lucky that Stephen Galson, the FDA director who overruled the panel, is a career public health official (not a political appointee) who cares more about women’s safety and health than about mud-slinging by abortion activists.
— Shaunti Feldhahn
Bias is likely behind the ruling
I couldn’t find the British study correlating sexually transmitted diseases to the morning-after pill. But I did find a study by the British Medical Journal in July that concluded quite the opposite: “[M]aking emergency hormonal contraception available over the counter does not seem to have led to an increase in its use, to an increase in unprotected sex, or to a decrease in the use of more reliable methods of contraception.”
The Brits should know. Emergency contraception has been safely on the market in the United Kingdom for five years. But that doesn’t stop opponents from using fear and exaggeration to try to convince us otherwise. Nor does it stop them from erroneously comparing emergency contraception to birth control pills.
Here are the facts: The birth control pill is a daily dose of hormones with possible adverse health effects if used long term. Emergency contraception is a single dose of the same hormones found in the pill. It prevents potential fertilization, with no serious long-term side effects.
And consider this irony: The FDA allows cold medicines, nicotine-laden smoking deterrents and herbal supplements on the market. These common over-the-counter drugs are used by millions for long periods, with disputed results and plenty of well-researched dangers. Yet the FDA refuses to make a single dose of emergency contraception publicly available?
Emergency contraception doesn’t abort fertilized fetuses. It’s contraception that’s quick and convenient with minimal side effects–like a condom, which isn’t without risks either. There are many men who are allergic to latex. So if we follow the same conservative logic, condoms aren’t safe either and should be put behind the counter. Or is a doctor’s counsel required for female contraception only, while men have free sexual license, unhindered by medical supervision? This double standard reeks of conservative politics that have been historically intolerant of anything resembling women’s sexual freedom.
The FDA buckled under White House pressure, despite the advisory board’s overwhelming recommendation of over-the-counter emergency contraception, 23 to 4. This questionable behavior isn’t the result of medical chivalry, as Shaunti would have you believe. It more resembles the paternalistic doctors in the early 20th Century who believed a woman was incapable of making decisions without counsel, and her uterus a medical scourge. Apparently, this bias hasn’t changed.
— Diane Glass
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Glass (dglass@ajc.com) is a writer and freethinker with a BA and MA in comparative religion. Feldhahn (scfeldhahn@yahoo.com) is a conservative Christian author and speaker, and married mother of two children. Both women have degrees from Harvard University.
