Critics claim the FDA put politics ahead of science when its decision on allowing over-the-counter sale of the Plan B morning-after pill was delayed at the end of August. Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington wrote, “It is time for the FDA to stop playing games with the health and well-being of millions of American women.” Editorial writers used lots of ink criticizing this non-decision.

Isn’t the FDA’s reluctance to approve over-the-counter access to Plan B an indication that they have stopped playing games with the health and well-being of millions of American women? Would easier access to Plan B improve the health of American women? Only if pregnancy is a disease! Yes, that is how they view pregnancy — especially unwanted pregnancy!

But is the cure more dangerous than the “disease”? What about the July 29th press release issued by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO)? They declared combined estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives as carcinogenic. The IARC placed them into their Group 1 classification, the highest classification of carcinogenicity, used only “when there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.”

That is a mouthful, but I think you get the point. I checked the Internet. There is no evidence that the mainstream media reported this classification of oral contraceptives as a known cancer-causing agent for humans. But the same media are willing to report and editorialize that failure to approve Plan B over-the-counter puts women’s health at risk? True science seems to suggest the exact opposite, so let’s delve into this a bit more.

Since Plan B contains a significantly higher dosage of a synthetic progestogen, doesn’t this mean that Plan B might contribute to factors causing cancer in women who use it? Where is the science that evaluates this risk? Oh, there isn’t any! That risk was washed away by assuming that Plan B will only be used once. You know, because it is only needed for an emergency. In actual use, that assumption has been proven wrong. When the morning-after pill was made easy to obtain in Sweden and England, it was used as another form of contraception. In Sweden, over the next 5 years after over-the-counter access was legalized, the teen abortion rate went up by 31%. In England, significant increases in sexually transmitted diseases occurred, especially among 16-19 year olds.

Susan Wood, director of the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health, resigned. In her resignation letter, she wrote “I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled.”

If approval of Plan B over-the-counter is dictated by science, then the health of women is apparently not a factor in that science. And I thought the FDA was supposed to make decisions to protect the American public from dangerous drugs! It seems to me that when supporters of Plan B invoke science, their messages are political and are not supported by science. Isn’t that the exact opposite of what they claim?

Bill Beckman