FDA CONSIDERS ALLOWING MORNING AFTER PILL TO BE SOLD OVER THE COUNTER

[Undertoad]

It's miscarriage, is what it is. Now the question becomes:

Much of the time, the lining of the womb just naturally does not accept the implantation of the zygote, and it winds up expelled as menstruation. The "morning after" pill makes it possible for the woman to create conditions where it doesn't implant.

So if God makes the conditions of the womb, and more than half the time, He creates a condition for this very type of early miscarriage, why would it be a mortal sin for the woman to create that condition?

If He knows that it will abort naturally, does He still provide the conceived zygote with a mortal soul?

[Happy Monkey]

I though miscarriage was when it lost its hold on the wall, not when it doesn't attach at all? Or is it both?

[Undertoad]

Both I think. Medline says,

A spontaneous abortion is the loss of a fetus during pregnancy due to natural causes. The term "miscarriage" is the spontaneous termination of a pregnancy before fetal development has reached 20 weeks. Pregnancy losses after the 20th week are categorized as preterm deliveries.

[9th Engineer]

It's not the scientific details that are motivating these people from blocking it, they believe that sex before marriage is wrong and will oppose anything and everything that promotes it or makes it easier. Simple.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

A spontaneous abortion is the loss of a fetus during pregnancy due to natural causes.

I wouldn't have thought that it was considered a fetus or a pregnancy before implantation.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

I wouldn't have thought that it was considered a fetus or a pregnancy before implantation.

That is the legal opinion in this country:

The term 'abortion' is used throughout this paper to refer to the induced termination of an established pregnancy (i.e. after implantation). It does not include the use of emergency hormonal contraception which the High Court has confirmed is not an abortifacient. All current methods of emergency contraception work prior to implantation and therefore are not abortifacients.

From here

[MsSparkie]

So much for stem cell research.....won't be any raw material.

[9th Engineer]

No big loss. If we had stopped Reeve from misinforming so many people about it it wouldn't be so bad.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

No big loss. If we had stopped Reeve from misinforming so many people about it it wouldn't be so bad.

Whoa, there's been a hell of a lot of information floating around, and continues to be forthcoming, that has nothing to do with Reeve. You don't believe it?

[9th Engineer]

I'm making more of a reference to the information used during the last election. Reeve made rounds with the Democrats playing up Bush's opposition to using federal money for stem cell research. He made outragous statements leading people to believe that people like him 'could have a cure' if only Bush wasn't stopping it. Complete bullshit. The state of the technology is this, we want to learn what it is about totipotent and pluripotent cells that allows them to become very specialized structures such as muscle or nerve bundles. They were giving people the idea that this would logically lead to the growing of whole organs and tissue replacements within a localized timeframe. That would have been like a scientist saying we need to research transistors so that we can build human-level AI systems.
I'm just saying he gave alot of people a very unrealistic view of what we can do or intend to do once given the ok with this.

[9th Engineer]

I'm also ticked that everyone thinks this is all Bush's doing, it was Clinton and the Dickey Ammendment which made it illegal to use federal money to fund stem cell research which involves destroying an embryo.

[Undertoad]

Shrug. I dunno, it's the same Medline entry that says spontaneous abortion happens 50% of the time.

ROB KIM / LANDOVThe FDA approved Plan B, an emergency contraceptive used to prevent pregnancy available without a prescription to women 18 and older, on August 24, 2006.
Nation
Why the Plan B Debate Won't Go Away
As the FDA approves the morning-after pill for over-the-counter sales to adults, conservatives beat up on the federal agency and the drugmaker begins its push to make Plan B available to younger women
By LAURA BLUE

Posted Friday, Aug. 25, 2006
The Food and Drug Administration may have ended a three-year health-policy dispute when it approved the "morning-after pill," Plan B, for over-the-counter sale yesterday. But fallout from the political feud surrounding Plan B will play out for months. Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Hillary Clinton dropped their objections Thursday to confirming Andrew von Eschenbach, acting FDA commissioner since September 2005; the Senators had vowed to stall von Eschenbach's nomination at the committee stage until the emergency contraception was made available over the counter. But more bitter response erupted immediately from conservative and faith-based groups, some calling on President Bush to withdraw von Eschenbach's nomination altogether because of the pills that, if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, can greatly reduce the chance of pregnancy.

Both sides of the debate were quick to decry the FDA's ruling as political. "Clearly in this case corners were cut," says Family Research Council health policy analyst Moira Gaul, claiming the FDA overlooked what her group calls a lack of safety evidence. Backers of Plan B, on the other hand, were angered by the FDA's age restrictions on the drug: patients under 18 must still have a prescription to get the drug, even though the FDA's own scientific advisers never recommended such a policy. "They have been playing politics with this issue for 40 months," says Jackie Payne, director of government relations for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, of FDA leadership. "They're continuing to play politics with teens."

Plan B is a synthetic form of progesterone, a hormone commonly used in birth-control pills, and it works by by preventing ovulation, preventing fertilization of the egg, or stopping a fertilized egg from lodging in the uterus. The FDA first approved Plan B, now owned by Delaware's Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc., for use with a prescription in 1999, but the controversy erupted in 2003. That's when FDA officials rejected the recommendation of their scientific advisers and refused to grant Plan B approval for over-the-counter use. The acting director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the time, Dr. Steven Galson, said the drug should not be sold over the counter because there was insufficient evidence to suggest that teenagers would be able to self-administer the drug safely. Critics slammed Galson and other FDA officials, and said going against the medical experts' opinion was a sign that FDA leadership had caved to conservative political pressure.

In fact, the FDA considered exactly the same studies when it approved the drug Thursday as it did when it denied the drug over-the-counter sales in 2003. The difference? When Barr resubmitted the application for over-the-counter approval, it limited its request to those patients 16 and older. (A Barr spokeswoman tells TIME it was hard to recruit many girls aged 15 and younger for the kind of studies the FDA wanted, since young teens make up such a small segment of the population needing emergency contraception.) The decision to limit over-the-counter sales to women 18 and up was a compromise reached by the FDA and announced by von Eschenbach — and it's a decision that Barr still intends to challenge. "We'd like to continue to do clinical work now to address the younger patients," says spokeswoman Carol Cox. In the meantime, Cox says, Barr plans to have its brand-new single-purpose prescription and over-the-counter packaging ready to ship out by the end of 2006.

The ethical debate, however, is going nowhere fast. Pro-lifers who believe life begins at conception, consider the contraceptive tantamount to abortion, and social conservatives fear that emergency contraceptives will encourage promiscuity. (A California study published in 2005 in Obstetrics and Gynecology found no link between the availability of the morning-after pill and sexual activity.) Meanwhile, even as groups like Planned Parenthood are heralding yesterday's decision as a victory for reproductive rights, they are angered that teens still face obstacles to getting emergency contraceptives. Perhaps the one thing they all agree on is that Plan B could have been handled better.

[Sundae]

This came to my attention this week:

From the Guardian re pregnant mothers who abuse drugs are considered to be commiting child abuse

Precis:

Monday September 4, 2006
Diane Taylor


When Regina McKnight, of South Carolina, went to her local hospital to give birth in May 1999, she prayed that the baby would be healthy. She had good reason to worry... McKnight had begun smoking crack. She was naturally devastated when the baby was stillborn - and shocked, five months later, to be charged with homicide. Prosecutors argued that smoking crack had caused the stillbirth and that McKnight should therefore be classed as a murderer.

In the US, more than 20 states now define drug use by an expectant mother as child abuse, neglect or even torture, while The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, passed by Congress in 2004, argues that foetuses are separate persons under the law, with rights independent of the pregnant woman. Any aspect of a pregnant woman's behaviour that might risk foetal health - except of course abortion - is therefore open to punishment in the courts. And last May, legislators in Arkansas proposed making it... an offence worthy of prosecution for a pregnant woman to smoke a single cigarette.

Lynn Paltrow believes that hatred of women is at the root of the trend. "It's linked to 30 years of vicious anti-abortion rhetoric that describes women who terminate pregnancies as murderers," she says. "You can't have that level of hateful rhetoric and just limit it to abortion. Once pregnant women are seen as capable of heinous crimes like murder, they are dehumanised."

Those targeted are disproportionately black and poor. And all the sound and fury about the highly prized foetus evaporates once it is no longer in utero: children of drug-addicted mothers are often dumped in foster placements, where study after study has shown they have little chance of thriving.

I just can't see that women who are addicted to hard drugs are going to suddenly turn their life around because of a possible conviction. Those who care about their unborn child may find the strength to do so - but they would have done it without threat of punishment.

Isn't this just a "feel good" solution for the law abiding middle classes? In the same way that refusing to provide the morning after pill to girls legally entitled to have intercourse is?

It costs £81 in Britain (US $152) to have an implant for 3 years. It can be removed at any point and the woman will be fertile from the moment of removal. It costs so much more to deliver a baby, put someone on trial and imprison them. Why aren't more women at risk of unwanted pregnancies being helped not hindered?

Sorry, I know it's a hobby horse. I would honestly be interested in arguments against.

So, it is your belief that someone who breaks the law habitually is, somehow, just someone with bad habits that we should feel sorry for?
Class has nothing to do with it... breaking a law is breaking a law, white collar crime or any other should be treated the same.
I feel some laws are wrong and fight to change them, sometimes I break them but know what will happen if caught & will have no one to blame but myself.