Third Way Dispatch

We haven’t had much occasion to cheer the Bush administration for anything lately, and when it comes to science, we have watched in dismay time and time again, as politics have dictated important outcomes. But yesterday, they finally got something right. After a nearly three year delay, the Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter sales of Plan B emergency contraception, otherwise known as the “morning after” pill. After six years of George Bush talking about his opposition to abortion and about the “culture of life,” this is actually the first significant step his administration has taken to reduce the number of abortions in America.

To be clear, Plan B does not cause an abortion. The FDA actually approved Plan B as a form of contraception in 1999 (until yesterday it required a prescription), and even the National Right to Life Committee agrees that emergency contraception (like Plan B) is a contraceptive. (See our fact sheet, “Emergency Contraception: Contraceptive, not Abortifacient“). What makes Plan B unique as contraception is that it works after unprotected sex but before a pregnancy begins, and thus it provides a final intervention point to prevent an unintended pregnancy.

Though it is common sense, it bears saying that the most effective way to reduce abortions is to prevent unintended pregnancies from happening in the first place. The numbers speak for themselves: of the 6,000,000 pregnancies every year, half of those are unintended, and almost half of all unintended pregnancies result in abortion. That’s 1.3 million abortions every year. And while there are many valid approaches to preventing unintended pregnancies from occurring, increasing access to contraception, like the FDA did yesterday by allowing Plan B to go over-the-counter, is realistic and effective. (Of course the FDA didn’t get it exactly right – those seeking Plan B must show ID, and anyone under 18 still needs a prescription. Still, it’s a real step forward.)

But lest we feel overly gleeful on the morning after this positive development, let’s pause for a moment to remember this Administration’s discouraging track record thus far. Until yesterday, the President and the conservatives in Congress have done nothing to support family planning, and they have done much to harm it. To name just a few examples, President Bush has consistently recommended decreased or flat funding for Title X, the nation’s only dedicated family planning program; Congress has passed a law that puts into question the long-established status of family planning as a required service for our country’s poorest women enrolled in the Medicaid program; and President Bush’s Mexico City policy has denied U.S. support for family planning supplies and services to countless women around the world.

The conservative approach to abortion reduction has been to pass laws that put people in jail. But that punitive approach has had little or no impact on the number of abortions. Take the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 – the procedure it targets accounts for 8 in every 10,000 abortions. The recently passed Child Custody Protection Act also would apply only to a small handful of abortions and have minimal or no impact on the overall American abortion rate (see my July 2006 dispatch entitled “CCPA: Clarifying the Constructive Progressive Approach on Abortion“).

Plan B, by contrast, is a giant leap forward in abortion-prevention. Over-the-counter access to Plan B has the potential to play an important role in reducing the number of unintended pregnancies in our country. It’s about time we turned Plan B into another aspect of our front-line approach to reducing the number of abortions in America.