Not having a need for contraception in my life, I did not know what the drug called “Plan B” is.
One thing I can be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend is that CBS Sixty Minutes has educated me. Not only about the drug itself but also about how the religious right has been successful in keeping the drug from being sold over the counter without a prescription, even though the drug has been shown to be very safe.
(CBS) When the “morning after pill,” also known as “Plan B,” was put on the market in 1999, it was described as an emergency contraceptive that prevents a pregnancy in cases of rape or accidents like condom breaks.
It is only available by prescription. But because women need to take it within 72 hours, the drug’s manufacturer applied to the Food and Drug Administration two years ago for permission to sell Plan B over the counter.
The drug is considered totally safe, so the request was seen as a slam dunk. But then Plan B became the target of anti-abortion rights groups, and part of the wider controversy over whether religious beliefs are encroaching on scientific decision-making.
Some confuse “Plan B” with RU-486, the so-called “morning after” pill, although they work differently.
But [Dr. Susan] Wood says this is not an abortion pill. “There is an abortion pill called RU-486, and this is not it,” she says. “An abortion pill interrupts an established pregnancy. This product is contraception. It does not interrupt an established pregnancy.”
She says even if you took it and were already pregnant, it would not end the pregnancy. “The only connection this product has with abortion is that it can prevent them by preventing an unintended pregnancy,” says Wood.
There is some debate about that interpretation. Most of the time, Plan B works by stopping ovulation so that a pregnancy cannot occur. In a small percentage of cases, when a woman is ovulating on the day she has unprotected sex, a fertilized egg could form. In that case, Plan B might prevent the egg from implanting in her uterus.
While most doctors do not consider that an abortion, anti-abortion-rights doctors do, such as David Hager, a gynecologist from Lexington, Ky., who won’t prescribe Plan B for his own patients.
“One of the mechanisms of action can be to inhibit implantation, which means that it may act as an abortifacient,” says Dr. Hager. He says abortifacient means it causes an abortion and that this medication may act to inhibit implantation.
Without implantation there cannot be a pregnancy. How can a woman be pregnant if the egg has not been successfully implanted in the womb? Without a pregnancy, there can be no interruption of said pregnancy.
Nature allows fertilized eggs to be passed out of the uterus all the time without implantation. It even flushes them out after implantation when a woman has a spontaneous abortion. What’s Dr. Hager doing about that? Maybe he should try to put nature in jail.
The fact is that Dr. Hager, who was asked to serve on the committee by the White House, was one of four people on the FDA advisory committee to vote against the over-the-counter sale of “Plan B.” Twenty-three members of the panel voted in favor of approving over-the-counter sales.
Under normal circumstances, a lopsided vote like that would guarantee over-the-counter sales of the drug.
While he denies that his vote was related to his religious beliefs, CBS had a video of a speech that Hager gave at a Christian college.
Some people believe Hager raised these objections because of his religious beliefs, but that’s something he denies. “The religious aspect did not enter into that decision for me,” he says.
But in to a speech he gave to a Christian college, he seemed to admit his role was all about religion. “God has used me to stand in the breach for the cause of the kingdom,” Hager said at the time.
He was talking about Plan B.
“I argued it from a scientific perspective. And God took that information and He used it through this minority report to influence a decision. You don’t have to wave your bible to have an effect as a Christian in the public arena,” says Hager.
Hager says he did not mean to suggest that God wanted Plan B to fail, and that he was His instrument. “I thought that God used me, He’d used my individual gifts of, whatever, in an individual way to be able to express my opinion.”
But with the speech, Hager may have fueled the fire of those who say that all he did was try to cloak religious beliefs in scientific language.
One other important thing that I learned from this story is that Walmart has a nationwide ban on selling the Plan B in their pharmacies.
In a survey of drugstores in Kentucky, Dr. Hager’s home state, the American Civil Liberties Union found that most pharmacies didn’t carry Plan B; 83 of them said they would even refuse to order it for women with prescriptions. These include Wal-Mart, which has a nationwide policy against dispensing Plan B.
So the issue is not safety. The issue is the right of individuals to make informed choices for their own lives.
I was looking forward to shopping at the new Walmart in Poulsbo which is set to open in the near future, if it hasn’t opened already. I’m a big fan of discount stores.
Having read that Walmart will not even sell this drug when a patient has a prescription, however, I don’t think I’ll be doing any shopping at Walmart. What good does it do me to save 10 cents on a bottle of dishwashing liquid, if my money supports a business that doesn’t think individuals should have control over their own bodies when it comes to sexuality and reproduction?
If I am willing to give up such an important liberty in order to save a a little money on household items, then I don’t place a very high value on science or individual liberty.
Walmart has every right to set their own policies in a free society, and we all have the right to boycott their stores if we do not wish to financially support such policies. Boycotting Walmart, especially during the holiday season, would be a very effective way to get this policy changed. As far as I’m concerned, this is one policy that has got to go.
I encourage you to read the entire CBS 60 Minutes transcript because it starts out with the story of a young woman who was raped and then to the emergency room of a Catholic hospital, where she was not offered the option of taking “Plan B”, even though the hospital was required by state law to do so.
First the rapist(s) denies her control over her own body, then the hospital that treats her after the assault does the same. It’s like being raped all over again.
What’s our Plan B when the religious fanatics in our country have taken away all of our liberties, when they have substituted faith for science?
Tags: Plan B, Walmart, Abortion