Battle over Plan B not finished...

[marmar]

Published on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington)
Battle over Plan B Isn't Finished
by Bonnie Erbe

Think the fighting's done over Plan B? You'd better have a Plan B, because it's far from over. Just because the Food and Drug Administration finally did most of what it should have done years ago -- it approved the "morning-after" pill for sale without a prescription to women who are at least 18 -- doesn't mean this battle is behind us.
Religious groups and religiously motivated conservatives tried to pressure President Bush to fire the acting FDA commissioner who finally pushed through permission to sell Plan B over the counter without a prescription.

Andrew von Eschenbach has been running the agency without congressional endorsement since last September. The hold on his confirmation by Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington state has now been lifted, and he should be confirmed not long after Congress returns from its summer recess.

Shortly after the Bush administration took office, a medical advisory panel to the FDA agreed Plan B was safe and should be given to any female who wants it without a prescription, regardless of age.

In swooped the religious right, which apparently believes that life begins before conception, while the medical community, most Americans and even most religious dogma believe that life begins at conception. The drug's approval was stalled for years.

This is a controversy driven by a minority of zealots who apparently believe that the Spanish Inquisition never should have ended and that any sex at all is bad unless it's between married couples having sex solely for the purpose of procreation. Their ideology generally stopped evolving somewhere between the fourth-century theologian Augustine and the Middle Ages.

The rest is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0830-24.htm

[Ignacio Upton]

1. Repeat this:

PLAN B IS NOT ABORTION!
Conception only begins once the fertilized egg is implanted (and attached) to the uterus. Plan B simply stops the fertilized egg from doing so, which technically stop conception, which means that Plan B is CONTRACEPTION! There shouldn't even be an age limit on this either. I would rather that a teenage girl avoid getting an abortion, and having Plan B is good way to lower the abortion rates.