If you listened carefully, you could have heard champagne corks popping in Planned Parenthood facilities all across America. Why? Because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fulfilled one of their highest priorities. The celebration was especially sweet because the victory was handed to them from the Bush administration.
The FDA has ruled that Plan B, also known as emergency contraception, will be available without prescription to women 18 years and older. Until then, federal guidelines required a doctor’s prescription for all women using this drug.
Plan B is not the same as RU 486, which sole purpose is to abort an unborn child. Plan B’s primary objective is to prevent pregnancy up to 72 hours after unprotected sex. The drug is highly controversial because it sometimes causes an early abortion.
During their attempt to make Plan B available without prescription, Planned Parenthood (PP), the nation’s largest chain of abortion mills, claimed it would prevent 1.5 million unwanted pregnancies and avoid 800,000 abortions every year. Now that victory is theirs and the champagne bottles are empty, PP is doing major backpedaling on those promises. Jackie Payne, PP’s director of government relations, told the Associated Press, “It will not reach that potential.” James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, agrees. He said any change “will be hard to measure because it will be so small.” Mr. Trussell said Plan B would be “like a cork on the ocean.”
Let’s look at the evidence. The United Kingdom approved over-the-counter sales of Plan B five years ago. The British Medical Journal reported that while Plan B had been called a solution for both abortion and teen pregnancies, it failed to deliver. Since it’s easy access, both pregnancies and abortions have increased in that country.
Pregnancy and abortion rates in America will also increase with the easy availability of Plan B. First, it will be impossible to enforce the 18-and-older restriction. Many younger girls will simply have an adult purchase the drug for them. We already have a serious problem of adult men having sex with minor girls. The legal term for this is statutory rape. These men will flock to the local drug store to illegally purchase the drug to cover up the fact they are victimizing young girls. Now that Plan B will be easier to acquire, we can realistically expect more sexual predators will make use of this new tool.
Second, Plan B will give women a false sense of security when it comes to unprotected sex and pregnancy. As a result, more women will be having sex, getting pregnant and having abortions. It’s already happened in England. Third, it will likely have a considerable negative impact by increasing sexually transmitted diseases, since the pill provides no protection against them.
With all the data stacked against the benefits of Plan B on society, why, then, did Planned Parenthood make over-the-counter sales one of their highest priorities? Evidence points to money. During a California court case, internal PP emails were made public. One was from the vice president of medical affairs, Vanessa Cullins, MD, to all PP Affiliate CEOs. In it she explained a sweet financial deal between PP and Barr Pharmaceuticals, the owner of Plan B. PP would get special pricing of $4.25 per dose of the drug for 5 years. The average PP facility charges $25. PP will be able to undercut local pharmacies and make an estimated cool profit of $20 for each Plan B kit. The email said Barr would help PP “develop and protect our market base.” If things go as planned, PP will make tens of millions of dollars selling the drug.
In the wake of the abortion industry’s big celebration of closing the “deal,” more unborn babies and their mothers – some children themselves – will be victimized by a deceptive system touted to improve their health and lives.
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