The Department of Defense will begin making the morning-after pill Plan B available at all of its hospitals and health clinics around the world, officials announced Thursday.
-- From "Pentagon to stock health facilities with morning-after pill" by Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer 2/5/10
The decision is the latest the Obama administration has made reversing politically sensitive policies involving women's health that were implemented during President George W. Bush's administration. Previously, the Obama administration has announced that it was rescinding a federal regulation that would have expanded the ability of health-care workers to refuse to provide medical care they found morally objectionable, including abortion and Plan B; has lifted federal restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research; and has restored funding to international family-planning groups.
The decision came after a recommendation by the Pentagon's Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, an advisory panel that voted in November to include Plan B and the generic Next Choice on the list of drugs all military facilities should stock. The Pentagon accepted the recommendation Feb. 3, a spokeswoman said.
Women's [pro-abortion] health advocates had long been pushing the Obama administration to allow the sale of the morning-after pill at military facilities. The same panel made a similar recommendation in 2002, but the policy was never implemented.
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From "Pentagon Will Require Bases to Stock 'Plan B' Morning After Pill" by Peter J. Smith, LifeSiteNews 2/5/10
The morning-after pill, or “Plan-B” medication, is designed to prevent sperm from fertilizing an egg if taken before an embryo’s conception. However, the drug can be taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse, and will also abort a newly conceived embryo by preventing its implanting into the wall of the mother’s womb. Although manufacturers bypass that fact by claiming life begins at implantation, not at the fertilization of the egg, science accepts that at the moment of conception DNA from the sperm and the egg unite to form a new and completely unique human being — nothing further is added by implantation.
After much controversy, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Plan-B for over-the-counter sales to women over 18 years-old in 2006.
Even pro-abortion advocates have admitted that emergency-contraception (EC) has a far higher failure rate at preventing pregnancy than theorists claimed. In a 2009 article for the RH Reality Check blog, journalists Elizabeth Westley, Francine Coeytaux and Elisa Wells reported that estimates showed that some effectiveness rates for Plan-B were reported as low as 59 percent and that EC had not driven down rates of unintended pregnancy or abortion. The trio expressed worries that such findings would “put the breaks on funding.”
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