EC Still Inaccessible for Military Women
By Nancy Northup
RHRealityCheck.org
Created Apr 1 2009 - 7:00am
For years, reproductive rights advocates have argued that when it came to policy decisions around women's health, the Bush administration was driven by politics, not science. Well, just last week, in complete vindication of those arguments, a federal court found that [1] the Food and Drug Administration, under President Bush's leadership, had been improperly influenced by "political considerations" in its decision-making around Plan B, the drug commonly known as the morning-after-pill. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ordered the FDA to reconsider its 2006 decision to allow only women 18 and older to get Plan B without a prescription. The court also ordered the agency to make Plan B available without a prescription to 17 year olds within in 30 days.
The judge in the case said that the FDA had over the years unjustifiably delayed issuing a determination on whether the contraceptive should be sold over-the-counter, and when the agency was finally pushed into a political corner, it approved Plan B only for 18 and older, despite their own scientists having found it safe and effective for all age groups. With this ruling we have succeeded in expanding access and hope to ultimately make it fully available to all women.
But emergency contraception is still difficult to access for many groups of women, including the more than 200,000 women serving in the Armed Services. It's excluded from the list of what military facilities, including the primary stores where families shop, are required to stock. |MORE
This page last updated April 8, 2009 7:15 .