Plan B a Rotten Plan

Details: 16 December 2011

Abortion and contraception apologists have been relentless in their advocacy of free and easily accessible (at any age) contraceptive drugs and devices. The latest push has been to get the so-called ‘morning-after pill’ or emergency contraception (EC) on drug and grocery store shelves so that girls of any age can have access to it without parental or physician involvement.

The manufacturer of an EC drug called Plan B (Teva Pharmaceutical) petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its approval of distributing this powerful drug off the shelf and without a prescription. Last week, the FDA granted Teva its request.

However, in a move that surprised both sides of this debate, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, rejected the FDA’s recommendation. Sebelius cited a lack of evidence that younger girls could safely use the drug without physician oversight. Current FDA rules require a prescription for Plan B for girls under the age of 18, while those over that age can request it from a pharmacist without prescription.

While the Secretary’s decision is a welcome victory for sanity, some observers are speculating that her decision was politically calculated, given that she has been a radical advocate of abortion and contraception, both as Governor of Kansas and as HHS Secretary.

One dose of Plan B is the equivalent to taking 40 daily Ovrette oral contraceptive pills in a 12-hour period. And like the ordinary birth control pill, Plan B’s side effects are not trivial: vomiting, stomach pain, tiredness, diarrhea, dizziness, breast pain, headache, and menstrual changes.

Furthermore, Plan B’s manufacturer notes in its prescribing guidelines that there is a risk of ectopic pregnancy up to five times greater than normal. And, most troubling, Plan B (and EC in general) is more likely than the daily-use birth control pill to cause an abortion by preventing an embryo from implanting if conception occurs.

So why would so many in the medical profession support widespread and easy access to such powerful drugs? Primarily, they claim it could significantly reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions.

However, after years of studies by proponents of EC, this claim has proved baseless. For example, James Trussell, who originated the claim that easier access to emergency contraception could "result in a greater than 50% reduction in abortion rates," has conceded that 23 published studies from 10 countries disprove his claim. According to every one of the 23 studies, published between 1998 and 2006, easier access to EC fails to achieve any statistically significant reduction in rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion.

In the September 2006 British Medical Journal, Anna Glasier said: "[D]espite the clear increase in the use of emergency contraception, abortion rates have not fallen in the U.K. They have risen from 11 per 1,000 women ... in 1984 ... to 17.8 per 1,000 in 2004." She adds: "Ten studies in different countries have shown that giving women a supply of emergency contraception to keep at home ... increases use by twofold to threefold ... but [has] had no measurable effect on rates of pregnancy or abortion."

Even the USA Today newspaper, in an editorial sympathetic to Plan B (12/9/11), acknowledged that such claims "have proved wildly optimistic." The editorial cited the Guttmacher Institute (which has ties to Planned Parenthood) as acknowledging that "there’s no data to show whether Plan B had an impact" on lowering abortion rates.

Abortion and contraception advocates will undoubtedly challenge (legally and politically) this decision by Secretary Sebelius. As they do this, their lie that Plan B will reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions must be exposed. Their own studies (those mentioned above and many others) expose the lie and are available on my website at www.nebcathcon.org (See "Family Planning Fact Sheet" under "pro-life," "printed resources").

You can contact Greg at The Nebraska Catholic Conference, 215 Centennial Mall South Suite 310, Lincoln, NE 68508; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.