Perhaps women (eighteen and older) feel a sense of relief that they may have access to the Morning-After Pill without a prescription, if the Food and Drug Administration approves. There appears to be a slight shift from the present administration’s conservative hold on the country. Or maybe I’m just being hopeful. Or, perhaps, the mess in the Middle East has brought a clearer focus on issues that really matter. Again, the shift may fall further into conservatism, if more money backs the movement. However, if the morning after pill provides a chance for women not to have been trapped into a predicament they wanted no part of, this is good news.
Hopefully, women won’t use it as birth control on a consistent basis. I also hope that these women are smart enough to make their partner use a condom since getting pregnant isn’t the only side affect from having intercourse.
Naturally, Concerned Women of America are opposing the plan.
“There’s clearly no way that the F.D.A. or Barr Labs could put a gender restriction on who buys the drug,” said Wendy Wright, the president of that group. “You could have a statutory rapist buy the drug in order to cover up his abuse.”
This kind of thinking is as skewed as the one about pedophiles crossing state borders to have their victim terminate a pregnancy without parental consent. Do all fundamentally conservative people have sensationalistic dramas rolling around in their minds all the time in order to justify stopping the rights of others?
The situation, though, isn’t really about women being able to protect themselves from an unwanted pregnancy. What does seem to be happening is that this is being used as a political ploy.
But the timing of the announcement — the day before Dr. von Eschenbach’s confirmation hearing in a Senate committee — raised skepticism on Capitol Hill about whether it might be intended to deflect criticism about delays in the drug’s application without a clear guarantee of action.
“Today’s announcement is nothing more than a delay tactic,” Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington, both Democrats, said in a joint news release. The senators are members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which is scheduled to hold its hearing on Dr. von Eschenbach today but is not scheduled to vote.
Assuming that the committee approves Dr. von Eschenbach’s nomination, Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Murray said they would block a floor vote on his confirmation until the F.D.A. made a final yes-or-no decision on the drug’s sale. Under Senate rules, any senator may place a “hold” on a floor vote to approve a nominee.
The senators removed a similar hold last year that had blocked a former F.D.A. commissioner, Lester Crawford, who then faced confirmation hearings. At that time, Dr. Crawford assured them that a decision on the drug would be made by Sept. 1, 2005, the senators said.
Meanwhile, women should have their gynecologist fill out an emergency prescription to have on hand, because who knows how long they will have to wait to have over-the-counter access.
Perhaps that shift I mentioned earlier was indeed fleeting.
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