Morning-after pill - FDA push to limit OTC sales angers Clinton

The Bush nominee to take over as head of the FDA faced a hostile Senate hearing over the issue of making the morning after pill more widely available.

The morning after pill is known as Plan B. It is consists of two pills made up of both estrogen and progesterone but in a very high dose, so that it is designed to ensure that unplanned pregnancies fail. The FDA leadership is determined to limit the availability to women over the age of 18.

However, I question the very idea that this product should even be available over the counter. Once again the various questions about what is best for the health of a woman is ignored. Instead, of caring about what is best for a woman, Hilary Clinton and her cohort seek to ensure that the number of Americans are limited due to the widespread availability of the morning after pill. No thought is given to the possibility that such a high dose of either estrogen of progestrone could be harmful to the woman concerned.

I write here as a mature woman who has had three children and has now gone through the menopause. Any disruption to the delicate balance of a woman's hormonal system can throw her body out of whack. Many of the diseases that are now quite common, not just in the USA, but elsewhere in the world, occur because of some form of hormonal imbalance. At this point in time we still do not understand how our hormonal receptors function so that we are constantly in a good state of health. When a woman becomes pregnant, as her hormonal levels change, she is subject to morning sickness or in some cases, all day nausea. The pregnancy causes several changes in hormonal levels, including that of prolactin. Interference with these levels could, for all we know be responsible for the number of women who have thyroid problems.

The issue here happens to be that the pharmaceutical company, Barr, who is responsible for the manufacture of Plan B, wants this product to be sold OTC. Already, there is one woman who resigned from the FDA as a protest because Plan B is not widely available. It seems to me that this woman misses the point regarding the issue of sexual intimacy outside of marriage. There would be no unplanned pregnancies of women were not behaving in a promiscuous way. Should this promiscuity be rewarded by making available a product that will either ensure that she does not become pregnant or will do harm to the child that is forming in the womb, so that any pregnancy that continues will end up with a child with disabilities.

These women are not concerned about the health of other women. They are only concerned about their own selfish agendas.