Plan B: A Political Prescription

Senior Food and Drug Administration officials were told that the application to sell the "morning-after pill" without prescription was going to be rejected before the staff completed its scientific review and months before the decision was made public, government investigators reported yesterday.

A report by the independent Government Accountability Office also said senior FDA officials, including then-Commissioner Mark B. McClellan, were actively involved in the politically sensitive decision -- one of four aspects of the agency's actions that the investigators called "unusual."

The GAO report, requested by Congress more than 16 months ago, said the agency did not follow its normal procedures in making the scientific assessment of the Plan B proposal and in having a top official sign off on the eventual decision after lower-ranking scientists refused.

Critics of the FDA's handling of the issue said the report confirmed their view that the agency had allowed politics to trump science. The application was strongly opposed by some social and religious conservatives, including 49 members of Congress who wrote a letter to President Bush asking that the application be rejected.

The FDA, in a statement responding to the report, said: "We question the integrity of the investigative process that results in such partial conclusions by the GAO. The report mischaracterizes facts and does not appear to take into consideration the input provided by the FDA."

But Susan F. Wood, a former FDA assistant commissioner for women's health who left her job to protest the agency's actions, said: "This report is a sad reminder of why I felt compelled to resign. Instead of improving and advancing women's health, the FDA leadership is ignoring its process and not relying on science and medical evidence."

But I'm sure that everything was done with the best of intentions, and that our Republican helmed FDA and Congress will allow full acountability and transparency:

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) said the GAO was unable to fully assess McClellan's role because he would not speak with investigators and because the agency provided no documents reflecting his communications with other officials. The FDA told the investigators that e-mails to and from McClellan had been deleted and that written memos were routinely destroyed.

Raising the possibility that this practice was a violation of federal record-keeping law, the congressmen wrote that "as the Plan B decision makes clear, retaining the documents of the agency head is essential for the transparent operation of government."

Unfortunately, kids, science, medicine and health are not privy to the Target policy of selective moral qualification. The fact is this fits perfectly nestled into the cultural activist attempt to reduce women's rights to determine their own health of the current leadership. It also shows the same kind of political pressure exerted on intelligence and scientific information across the board by The Administration- from selective environmental data that supports their devastating "Clear Skies" laws which allow industry to spew copios amounts of pollution to their pressures and many manipulations on intelligence faculties to twist intelligence to support their justifications for Invasion. This is an Administration, and a cultural ideology, that does not respect intelligence, science, or inquiry, and cannot redeem their positions any other way than underhanded, ethically devoid political trickery.

Shame, really. Because they might find out that a woman's right to determine her health, in the long run, ends up building cultural health. Motherhood is about nurturing health- but The Administration's interests are in stifling, controlling, paternal disgust.