The War Against, You Name It

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with my low opinion of the right-to-life movement, due especially to its disgusting habit of enforcing its anti-woman ideology rather than even attempting to reduce the number of abortions which take place annually. Apparently nothing is going to change anytime soon. Last week the FDA announced that it is indefinitely delaying the decision over whether the morning-after pill can be sold over the counter, offering up the flimsy excuse that the pill would fall into the hands of horny 16 year olds who would use it for the nefarious purpose of screwing in the restrooms [pardon the paraphrase.] This excuse makes no sense because for one thing, pharmacies can solve the problem with a simple ID check and for another, everybody knows that teenagers never use contraception anyway. (Who would have thought that getting teens to take responsibility for their sexual lives could even be possible, let alone undesirable?) The means by which the FDA arrived at its decision is even weirder: it came as a fiat from the commissioner, apparently without the consensus or approval of the rest of the agency. Now FDA Assistant Commissioner Susan Wood has resigned in protest, and with good reason. This is a piece of such rank hypocrisy that it could only be the work of the religious right. There's not space here to wonder again why the Bush administration continues to wage its war on science. I had hoped, however, that a supposedly "pro-life" administration (whatever that means) might at least show a grain of interest in a tool which could cut the estimated 3 million unintended pregnancies which occur every year in half. No such luck. Given a choice between making real progress on abortion, and controlling female bodies like chattle, well there's no choice at all.