The Morning-After Pill     8/25/2006
By Wendy Wright, Carol Denner R.N., Jill Stanek R.N.

A pill that would make abortions rare? Too simple to be true.

A pill that would make abortions rare?

If this sounds too simple to be true, you are right. Backers of the morning-after pill claim that easy access to the drug will lower the number of abortions. But the first clue that makes this suspect is the campaigners themselves: abortion advocates. One of their top priorities is to make the morning-after pill available to anyone, with no age restriction, parental involvement or qualified medical oversight.

But will the morning-after pill be the solution for the night-before's mistakes? Or another false promise that causes more problems for the consumers and society?

Women's Capital Corporation, the creator of the morning-after pill Plan B, and Barr Labs, which bought the drug, petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make Plan B available over-the-counter, without a prescription. On May 6, 2004, the FDA declined, concluding it had not been adequately tested to determine how easy access to the drug would affect adolescents.

In its non-approval letter to Barr Research, the FDA stated:

Based on a review of the data, we have concluded that you have not provided adequate data to support a conclusion that Plan B can be used safely by young adolescent women for emergency contraception without the professional supervision of a practitioner licensed by law to administer the drug.

Questions had been raised about the effect of easy access to the morning-after pill on adolescents and on sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates. Notably, a groundbreaking study in the United Kingdom released in April, 2004, found that "the shift towards greater promotion of emergency birth control appears to have worsened the impact on STI [sexually transmitted infection] rates since 2000." In 2000, regulations were passed that made it easier to dispense the morning-after pill without a doctor's prescription and initiatives introduced to promote the drug to young people.

The study concludes "it appears that some measures aimed at reducing adolescent pregnancy rates induced changes in teenage behavior that were large enough not only to negate the intended impact on pregnancy rates but to have an adverse impact on another important area of adolescent sexual health: sexually transmitted infections." [more ...]

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