August 24, 2006. Remember this date.

This is the self-congratulatory email that NARAL is sending around to its supporters:

We did it!
At 9:20 a.m. today, the FDA approved over-the-counter access to the "morning-after" pill!
Dear [supporter],

Thanks to the letters, petitions, and support from people like you, the FDA finally overcame the political pressure from the White House, Congress, and anti-choice lobbyists, and approved the morning-after pill for over-the-counter sales.

Medical experts and scientists at the FDA have asserted for years that the morning-after pill - which can prevent an unintended pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after sex - should be available without a prescription. It's safe, it's effective, and it's a commonsense way for women to prevent unintended pregnancy.

Thank you again for helping achieve this victory for women - your action does make a difference.

My best,

Nancy Keenan, President
NARAL Pro-Choice America

From this date forward, I'll be sadly counting the incidents of the women harmed or killed by the Morning After Pill and the Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) explosion it's already led to, now that it's available over the counter in the entire U.S., without a prescription, just as it was from 2/98 to 6/99 in Washington state and in the UK from 1999 to 2003--

--where, respectively,
a) as FDA heard from seasoned, respected OBGYNs:

1. "chlamydia and gonorrhea rates have risen nearly 20 percent in [the U.S.] in the last four years, concomitant to the high profile advertising of the morning after pill which, intended or not, promote the notion that taking Plan B will make up for the lack of sexual responsibility," and
2. "Both U.K. and New Zealand have warned doctors when they had a 5.9 percent rate of unintended pregnancies which were ectopic" and "The Washington State data...indicates that the pharmacist said that 85 percent of the subjects needed medical follow-up, needed medical information. Is there concern about failure to diagnose ectopic pregnancy among this population?"

and

b) in 2002-04, UK studies in the British Medical Journal and at Nottingham University Business School showed that, after dispensing free MAPs to females from 1998 to 2002,

1. "between 1998 and 2004 rates of diagnoses of infectious syphilis (primary and secondary) in males increased by 1520%",
2. syphillis in females increased from 1999 to 2000 by 36% and 31% from '98 to '99, and
3. "gonorrhoea ... rose by 102%, from 10,204 to 20,663, between 1995 and 2000, with the steepest increase (29%) between 1999 and 2000. The rises have been widespread and have been highest among older teenagers (16-19 years), at 178% for male[s] and 133% for female patients." The uplift from 1998 to 1999 was 23%. Prior to 1998? 1996-98 were level at 13,000 cases and 1993-1995 remained 10,000 cases.

It's no coincidence to UK researchers that their 4 year experiment of making MAPs easily available occurred from 1998 through 2002:

Paton, David, "Random Behaviour or Rational Choice? Family Planning, Teenage Pregnancy and STIs." Nottingham University Business School, November 2003, presented at the Royal Economic Society Conference, Swansea, April 2004:

[R]ecent increases in the number of youth family planning clinic sessions had little overall impact on teenage pregnancy rates, did not lead to reductions in teenage pregnancy rates, but led to significantly higher rates of diagnoses of STIs amongst teenagers...[In groups of UK women aged] 16-19 and under-16, [f]amily planning clinics appear to have significantly increased STI rates for both age groups, especially in the later years...[T]he shift towards greater promotion of emergency birth control appears to have improved the impact on pregnancy rates and to have worsened the impact on STI rates since 2000. This evidence is inconsistent with models of random behavior.

Lest we forget:

chlamydia can cause PID in women, and in men, epididymis. Researcher Paton, whose study is linked to above, states that it is "particularly prevalent amongst young women" and "the most likely STI both to remain undetected and to be correlated with the family planning variables." Left untreated, these diseases prevent people from having children and can cause pneumonia in newborns.

Syphilis increases the risk of getting HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) by 3- to 5-fold.

Herpes can't be cured, and you can infect any partner you ever have even if you're not having an outbreak.

As of March 2004, drug-resistant [i.e., easily fatal] gonorrhea has broken out in Boston worse than it did the four prior years in Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia and Las Vegas.

And it was discussed in the FDA transcripts link how some side effects of MAPs--unlisted on the box--are amazingly similar to the symptoms of ectopic pregnancies, which if undiagnosed, can kill the woman.

I guess NARAL and its supporters don't think these folks are good enough "medical experts and scientists at the FDA." No, NARAL thinks they're just as rightwingnutjob as we are to dare question the FDA:

1. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the Americal Medical Association,
   
2. Dr. David Graham, a senior FDA safety scientist,
   
3. Dr. Jerry Avorn, Harvard Medical School expert,
   
4. Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine

No, I guess we're just all idiots, after all. The "leftwing blognuts" (as TIME Magazine adoringly calls them) are running the loonybin.

(we originally posted on some of this here in Dec. and Sept. 2004)