60 Minutes on Plan B

Crooks and Liars has the video. I happened to catch this last Sunday. The piece was very well done. If you haven't heard about it, the FDA has refused to grant permission for Plan B to be sold over the counter. Plan B is an emergency contraceptive that must be taken within the first 72 hours after sex in order for it to be effective. It is essentially a concentrated dose of the same drugs used for birth control pills. Studies have found it to be just as safe as birth control, and its legal sale over the counter (it is currently available only by prescription) could go a long way toward reducing the number of abortions in this country.

However, it seems that some pharmacists are refusing to dispense this medication on "moral grounds." There actually is an "abortion pill" (RU-486), but they are referring to Plan B in the same terms when it is actually far different.

60 Minutes went to various pharmacies with a prescription and was denied every time but one. In one case, a man told the woman that he could order it for her, but it would "take several days," after which time, of course, it would be of no use.

The pharmacies were in Kentucky, which is the home state of Dr. Hager, an Ob-Gyn appointed to the FDA. Hager's minority opinion written in dissent to the overwhelming approval of an FDA committee for Plan B's OTC application. His objections were adopted by Dr. Lester Crawford, head of the FDA - another Bush appointee, which is why Plan B is still not available over the counter.

Here's an article about what kind of guy Dr. Hager is. This is a little sample:

---Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you."

Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body, and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched teeth. ---

- Read the article to find out why she's upset -

---In his private practice back in Kentucky, Hager doesn't prescribe emergency contraception, because he believes it is an abortifacient, and, not surprisingly, his was one of the four votes against widening its availability. But rather than voice his ethical opposition to the product, Hager emphasized his concern about adolescents, which other committee members have since called a "political fig leaf." According to Dr. James Trussell, who voted in favor of Plan B, the FDA had at hand six studies examining whether teens as young as 15 would increase their "risky" behavior if they knew they had a backup emergency contraceptive--and none of the studies showed any evidence for that contention.

In his sermon at Asbury College last fall, Hager proudly recounted his role in the Plan B decision. "After two days of hearings," he said, "the committees voted to approve this over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4. I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA.... Now the opinion I wrote was not from an evangelical Christian perspective.... But I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and He used it through this minority report to influence the decision." [Emphasis added.]---