If the debate over Plan B emergency contraception had anything to do with science, said Susan Wood, there would be no debate.
“Based on public health and scientific evidence,” said the former women’s health director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Plan B should be “available over the counter for everyone of child-bearing age.”
Wood spoke at a Colorado state Senate hearing Wednesday to make that point. Plan B, she said, “is safer than aspirin.”
Wood’s testimony echoed a statement by a doctor from the Colorado Gynecology and Obstetric Society. The doctor’s statement came at another statehouse hearing. Both hearings were for a law that lets pharmacists prescribe emergency contraception to women.
The American Medical Association and the Colorado Medical Society support making Plan B easily available. Pharmacists are ready to do the job, if the drug can’t be sold over the counter. Still, Colorado’s Plan B hearings became a forum where politics and religion posed as science.
Wood knows all about that. She quit the FDA because of it. Her legislative testimony Wednesday was her first. She came to Colorado to lecture at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She’s a scientist, not a politician.
That was why she decided to speak at the Senate hearing. As a scientist, Wood saw the studies that show Plan B is safe and effective in preventing the unwanted pregnancies that often lead to abortions.
She saw the studies that show the availability of emergency contraception does not cause young women to stop using regular birth control or engage in more unprotected sex. She saw the FDA’s scientific advisory panel vote 23-4 to make Plan B available over the counter to everyone of child-bearing age. She saw the same panel vote 27-0 to endorse the safety of emergency contraception.
Then, Wood watched quackery.
She watched one Republican presidential appointee at the FDA refuse to accept the science of his own staff and advisers. When the makers of Plan B came back with a proposal to sell the drug over the counter to women 17 and older, Wood saw a second Republican presidential appointee indefinitely block Plan B by asking for comments that had nothing to do with public health and everything to do with bowing to charlatans who wrongly claim Plan B causes abortions.
So Wood left her job as an assistant commissioner of the FDA. She ended a 15-year government career advocating for women’s health in Republican, as well as Democratic, administrations. “I think the agency lost its independence and put the credibility and ability of the FDA at risk,” Wood told me. “I couldn’t ignore that what they did was not in the best interest of women’s health.”
Plan B doesn’t cause abortions, said Wood, who has a Ph.D. in biology. The drug will not end existing pregnancies. It works like regular birth control pills or intrauterine devices, delaying ovulation or fertilization. The charge that Plan B chemically changes the uterus and keeps some fertilized eggs from attaching to the uterine wall is speculative and no different from what an IUD might do, Wood said. “We don’t have a test to see if a free-floating fertilized egg is in a woman’s system. But half of fertilized eggs (in an unaltered uterus) never stick anyway.”
FDA advisory panel members who opposed Plan B also opposed all forms of artificial birth control, she added. That is their individual right. But it is not the right of a vocal minority to distort science or dictate public policy. “The vast majority of people,” said Wood, “are comfortable with contraception.”
State legislators should remember that. So should Gov. Bill Owens. He hasn’t taken a stand on pharmacists prescribing Plan B. But he vetoed a law last year that would have made hospitals tell rape victims about it. Owens vetoed the law after the Catholic Church claimed it violated their hospitals’ religious freedom.
With doctors and pharmacists on board, no such easy out exists this time.
What’s left is science. And as Susan Wood reminded everyone this week, the scientific community has spoken.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
