Monday, February 27, 2006
Plan B Battle Line Shifts to States
There they go again. The Neanderthals are doing their thing--protecting morality of women. These are the same virtuous people who oppose women's right to choose abortion under any circumstances and sex education that includes teaching use of contraceptives! Message to women: Don't have sex unless you want to be pregnant. Pray and take cold showers. And they conveniently have no memory of what they did when they were young. The Taleban mentality alive and well in the red states. The Post: "Expand or restrict access". More than 60 bills have been filed in state legislatures already this year, and that follows an already busy 2005 session on emergency contraception. The resulting tug of war is creating an availability map for the pill that looks increasingly similar to the map of "red states" and "blue states" in the past two presidential elections -- with increased access in the blue states and greater restrictions in the red ones.
- The FDA's inaction on Plan B has been sharply criticized by most major medical societies and many in Congress, and led to a lawsuit by the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. The federal magistrate judge hearing the case on Friday concluded that the center had established a "strong preliminary showing of 'bad faith or misbehavior' " on the part of FDA officials, and so ordered the case to go forward and ruled that top current and past FDA leaders should be interviewed under oath.
