Word: fda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Several months ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considered a proposal to make emergency contraception over the counter and place this birth control right on pharmacy shelves. Yet despite its potential to reduce teen pregnancy, politics trumped rationality and an organization that was created to keep partisanship out of important medical decisions caved in under political pressure. In a letter to the FDA, 44 members of Congress wrote, “We urge you to reject the petition currently before you to make the morning-after pill as accessible to our nation’s teenage daughters as aspirin...
Never mind that the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both promoted over-the-counter emergency contraception as medically safe. Forget the fact that an FDA advisory panel voted 24-3 to recommend that emergency contraception be available without a prescription. Ignore the estimate that over-the-counter availability is predicted to result in 1.7 million fewer unwanted pregnancies and 800,000 fewer abortions each year in the United States. While the FDA technically functions as a medical regulator—not a morality stipulator—it decided to delay a decision...
When it comes to pregnancy prevention, high school and college females have always been the victims of these kinds of morality policies. While the FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960, state laws and local policies made it nearly impossible for a single woman to obtain a prescription. And until the late 1960s, it was actually illegal for an unmarried woman under 21 to obtain the pill without consent from her parents. Sex—or more accurately—safe sex was considered inappropriate in the eyes of the government for single gals. Those who violated these social...
What makes over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill all the more important now is that it would render many of these restrictive measures moot and keep these morality demagogues out of a woman’s personal family planning decisions. Yet the FDA seems more concerned with how this policy will affect teen sex rates rather than how it could reduce teen pregnancy rates. A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine condemns the FDA for allowing “political considerations” to delay their decision on this issue...
...march is about more than just abortion. Another hot button issue is emergency contraception, a shameful example of science subordinated to politics. Despite the full approval of two FDA scientific advisory panels, the agency is bowing to pressure from conservative groups and stonewalling efforts to allow a new brand of emergency contraception to be made available over-the-counter. A possible FDA ‘compromise’ recently floated in the press would single out teenage girls, prohibiting them from buying the drug without a prescription. This is nonsense; if anything, teens have more to gain from over...