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Susan Wood, an Interview

Lauren

The Village Voice has a great interview with Susan Wood, the former director of the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health, who resigned after a sneaky move to keep the morning-after pill, called Plan B, off pharmacy shelves even after some called it the “safest product they had seen in years.”

Who made the decision to postpone selling Plan B in pharmacies?
I don’t know. It did not appear to me that any of the professional staff were involved. At every level of the review process, we agreed that this was safe, effective, and appropriate for over-the-counter use. The decision was not made in the usual passage.

Opponents call Plan B an “abortion pill.” Is there any logic to this?
The only connection this product has with abortions is that it prevents them. The public debate baffles me. It’s extraordinary. Plan B delays ovulation. No matter when you believe life or pregnancy begins, this product is unlikely to ever involve a fertilized egg.

Italicized emphasis mine.

via Feministing

29 thoughts on Susan Wood, an Interview

  2. Oh, come on, men have a conspiracy to keep women from controlling their own bodies?! I’m a dude, and I’m 90% certain that isn’t on the “Men Convention” talking points.

    I’m not 100% ready to throw in with the idea that the morning after pill in question has been shot down by sneaky eeevil neocons legislating morality. Malkin reported that a similar pill that I’m not entirely certain is or is not the same pill we are discussing here caused a few fatalities (Admittedly, a bit sensationalist, as pills kill people usually. That’s what happens with some of them.).

    Still, given the current political climate, the idea of the pill being shot down for political reasons passes the “Could this logically happen given reasonable people?” test, so I cannot dismiss it, but I prefer to avoid “conspiracy”-related ideas if at all possible.

    By contrast, the idea that men are conspiring to keep women from controlling their own bodies does not. Perhaps they have different motivations.

  3. The point of the second paragraph was in a sentence that I forgot to add.

    “I’m just saying that there could be another angle to this story. Malkin sees pro-choice rushing of such pills to the market for PC purposes. Whether or not she is correct (I see no reason to call her more correct than donna’s theorizing.) is beside the point.”

  4. “Malkin sees pro-choice rushing of such pills to the market for PC purposes.”

    It has nothing to do with political correctness. What we have is a political and ideological deflection of putting a perfectly safe contraceptive on the market that has been tested and retested all over the world. It has everything to do with the war against reproductive rights, and the war against reproductive rights is merely a cover for a larger war against free will.

    In this case, supporting Donna’s comment, this specifically attacks the free will of women. If we are not allowed the strength of self-determination, we do not have equal rights of freedom and liberty by law.

  5. Malkin reported that a similar pill that I’m not entirely certain is or is not the same pill we are discussing here caused a few fatalities

    In other words,

    I’m ignorant. I’m really ignorant. In fact, I know so little about this issue that I cannot accurately quote Michelle Malkin’s reports on it.

    Why should we pay any attention at all to what you have to say, again?

  7. I think so too; I remember a cluster of stories around parental-consent laws. That’s what I meant by ignorant. RU-486 has caused a small number of fatalities–much lower than many other drugs still on the market, and one directly attributable to poor aftercare and supervision. It’s not a dangerous drug. EBC is even safer.

  8. *Looks around*

    Malkin’s article was shamelessly sensationalist. I honestly did not think it was worth quoting.

    I guess that’s what I get for trying to be sensible. Aw, well.

    Lauren, I’m not defending what Malkin sees. What I AM saying is that it could still be possible there is another reason that this pill was pulled.

    And from my read of pro-lifer sentiment, attacks on abortion are not meant as a part of a “larger war on free will.” I have simply not seen a conservative-wide movement to stop women from having free will. What I do see is a group of people who fervently believe that killing a fetus is equivalent to killing a human (A baby human.), with varying degrees of such fervor. If you see it as a direct, personal, and planned attack solely on the free will of a woman, you’re interpreting the debate wrongly, unless you can show me some proof that there is an actual concerted attack on the free will of women. To me, the very idea seems preposterous. I like women, they’re my favorite gender. Unless there is an organization of deranged sociopaths in charge, (Those of you in the back who snickered and said “The Bush Administration,” I ask you to kindly not respond.) I simply don’t see ANY rational reason for someone in today’s society to purposely try to attack women’s free will. I’m ALL FOR women’s free will.

    Abortion, I’m neutral on; I think both sides have really good arguments, but I simply don’t think the issue can be decided lightly when you take into account what is at stake, pro-life or pro-choice, and I am eternally thankful that I don’t have to directly decide that law of the land.

  9. RU-486 is what I remember. I thought Plan B was some kinda goofy name for the drug and it might have had some kind of more scientific name.

    From a cultural aspect of the effects of Plan B, well, I don’t like promoting free easy sex everywhere, but if dudes can have condoms, why not let the ladies have Plan B?

  10. Being anti-free easy sex, by the way, is anti-free easy sex for BOTH genders.

    And it may or may not stem from my inability to get any to begin with. *Sob*

  11. “I don’t like promoting free easy sex everywhere,”

    Wow, you took a wrong turn into this part of the blogosphere. You might as well advocate race slavery, given the reaction your sentiment is going to receive around these parts.

  14. If you two want to pick a fight, that’s fine with me, but rescind your silly ban so we can crap in your yard instead of Lauren’s.

  15. the idea that men are conspiring to keep women from controlling their own bodies

    Did someone say it was just men? Plenty of women are happy to limit the choices of other women, you know.

  16. What I do see is a group of people who fervently believe that killing a fetus is equivalent to killing a human (A baby human.), with varying degrees of such fervor. If you see it as a direct, personal, and planned attack solely on the free will of a woman, you’re interpreting the debate wrongly, unless you can show me some proof that there is an actual concerted attack on the free will of women.

    That sort of hits the nail right on the head. BTW, did I take a wrong turn in the blogosphere? 🙂

  17. Whatever, whiner. You blew it–I let you hang out and act like an asshole but once you crossed the line into the “fuckslut” territory, well, I won’t say you’re a waste of oxygen, but certainly a waste of webspace.

  18. I’m not sure that there’s a conscious desire to “control women’s bodies” as much as to control behavior, period, and remake society in a certain image. The fundamentalist far right has a tremendous amount of influence over the GOP and the Administration. To many on that side, “compromise” is out of the question; it’s their way or…well, the highway to hell. Abortion is murder to them. They disapprove of contraceptives because they think that contraception encourages promiscuity. And it plays to all their prejudices to believe that any contraceptive pill must be an abortifacient.

    My objection to the far religious right is not that it exists, but that its most avid practitioners seem to feel they have the right to dictate how everyone else should live, too.

  20. Harrison, rational, but I don’t see “tremendous” influence. What I DO see is that certain conservatives, ones that you might accuse of being influenced by the overtly political religious, believe that a complete lack of moral judgements is unhealthy for a society and want to ensure that certain behaviors are discouraged. For many of them (I like to call them the reasonable ones.), religious laws have little to do with it rather than a certain distaste and apprehension about our society becoming as passive as the some of the European countries or even the often-cited comparison to the Roman Empire disentigrating due in part to a lack of morality among its citizens.

    Now, this sort of sentiment, where I sense it, is not trying to be sex police because they get jollies from stopping sex as much as they are trying to aid nation-wide relationships by discouraging casual sex (Taking home the cow vs. getting the milk for free, seen as an impediment to meaningful relationships by adding too much reward without making people work toward it.). Better family structures I would say anyone can agree create better-adjusted children.

    This same sort of sentiment, to me, drives the part of the semi-rational opposition to gay adoption: Worries about gay parents effect on family structures, those taking an opposition to gay adoption taking a hard-line “no” stance which I could not call rational. Contrast this, of course, with the religious views on the “evils” of homosexuality.

    Opposition to gay marriage, while I’m on a role, I would say is mostly religious, except for the, in my opinion, very reasonable argument saying “It’s fine, just don’t call it marriage.”

    Ahem, why do you guys want in Pandagon so much?

  21. Lauren, I’m not defending what Malkin sees. What I AM saying is that it could still be possible there is another reason that this pill was pulled.

    The stated reason why Plan B isn’t being approved for OTC use has nothing to do with the safety of the drug per se; the stated reason is that they’re concerned that if teenagers have ready access they won’t be able to figure out the label. In principle, this could be addressed by a label comprehension study, but, since it’s likely that the bigger concern is that if teenagers have ready access to Plan B, they’ll have more sex, the company that makes it decided instead to try to go for OTC availability for adults only. And this has been stalled. No one has suggested that the drug in itself is more risky than other OTC drugs. The latest delay is supposed to be so the FDA can gather comments about how to keep Plan B out of the hands of teenagers if it’s sold OTC. So, in principle there could be another reason, but I don’t see where in this case there is.

    What’s worse is that Plan B is being hit from both sides: the FDA won’t make it available over the counter, and there are attempts in various states to pass legislation to allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense it to women who have a prescription on grounds of conscience. And this is a contraceptive, a drug that works by suppressing ovulation, not an abortion pill like RU-486.

    but if dudes can have condoms, why not let the ladies have Plan B?

    I agree.

  22. Now, this sort of sentiment, where I sense it, is not trying to be sex police because they get jollies from stopping sex as much as they are trying to aid nation-wide relationships by discouraging casual sex

    Personally, I think discouraging casual sex is just fine, as long as its done in churches, in families, or through conversations in which you explain why casual sex is a bad idea, etc. And as long as men and women are equally discouraged from having casual sex. What I don’t believe is that a desire to discourage casual sex should drive decisions about the availability of medications. Birth control should be widely available; if a vaccination is developed for HPV it should be widely available, etc.

  23. Re: men controlling women’s bodies
    Well, I’m not pro-choice, but there are some anti-abortion advocacy cases in recent years that have struck me as very misogynistic. There was a case in PA three years ago where an abusive boyfriend sued his girlfriend because she tried to have an abortion (she ended up miscarrying); there are many men who believe that the father of the baby should have veto power over a mother’s decision to have an abortion or not. Which worries me because rapists, deadbeat dads and batterers could abuse this law to a horrible extent. I’ve also heard of laws requiring women to get their husband’s permission before they get abortions, very similarly to a minor getting her parent’s permission before she gets an abortion, and thus implying that a woman should be subordinate to a man like a child is subordinate to his/her parents. Most people probably believe the latter, but I’m a feminist and it pisses me off.
    Unrelated to abortion, there are also laws on the books legalizing marital rape, forbidding pregnant women from getting divorced (recently rescinded in WA state), legalizing female prostitution for male clients but not male prostitution to male or female clients, and giving men who sexually abuse their own daughters lighter punishments than men who sexually abuse non-relatives.

  24. Well, Lynn, part of that reaches a bit of a slope where the releasing of the drug over the counter, in effect, creates a bit of societal acceptance of the practice, something like needle exchange. Such a thing can undermine attempts at creating a stigma.

    Kate, I would not worry about any of those laws you mentioned as “unrelated to abotion” if I were you. Nobody sensible is going to take those sorts of crap laws seriously, God-willing.

    Which worries me because rapists, deadbeat dads and batterers could abuse this law to a horrible extent.

    I would certainly hope that such a law would have PROVISIONS for that sort of incident, especially were it written in this day and age.

    The “minor getting her parent’s permission” analogy doesn’t fly all that much, especially because its the man’s baby too. The argument about that doesn’t stem from subjugating women as much as it is raising the status of the fetus to a baby. Can a woman put a baby up for adoption without her husband’s permission? I’m pretty sure she can’t. Why? Not because the man rules over her, but because he has a say about his baby too.

    There is one issue here that I have heard phrased before: child support. Men have a point in that full, legal, and societally accepted abortions create a double-standard for them in that if they impregnate a woman out-of-wedlock, they have to pay for the child (I’m pretty sure that’s how the system works.). But, with abortion as an option, the woman can simply choose not to have the child. As a corollary, this means that the woman makes a conscious decision to have the child and not have an abortion, it isn’t forced on her. Whereas the man’s money getting tapped to raise the child, which in theory is because the situation was forced on the woman… he has no legal say in the matter, he has no control over the choice. He has to pay because the woman chose not to have an abortion.

    I don’t like the idea of trying to change this status, though, as it means creating more incentives for abortion, but it is something worth considering.

  25. The first paragraph should have included a clause mentioning that I was simply listing reasons for rational people to pause on the thought of legalizing the drug for such use.

    [T]here are attempts in various states to pass legislation to allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense it to women who have a prescription on grounds of conscience.

    Attempts, shmattempts. That kind of stuff won’t pass. Watchdogs like yourself and the groups on your behalf will shame that kind of stuff out of being passed.

    Making Plan B adults only is kinda dopey, but I can see the logic behind it…

  26. What I AM saying is that it could still be possible there is another reason that this pill was pulled.

    “It’s possible” is not an argument. It’s also possible that Pfizer is bribing the FDA to keep Plan B down while Pfizer develops its own version of this drug. But yanno, “possible” is not a synonym for “likely,” “plausible” or “a good point.”

    The former director of the FDA Office of Women’s Health resigned because she believed the FDA’s decision was made outside normal channels and in the face of information about Plan B. The FDA’s stated reason for holding back is that they’re afraid teenagers might get it without a prescription. Justifying the FDA’s decision with vague allusions to Michelle Malkin or “possibilities” is, well, not much of a counterargument.

    What I do see is a group of people who fervently believe that killing a fetus is equivalent to killing a human

    If this were true, then there would be wide support in the pro-life movement for nonabortifacient contraceptives; there would be no support for exceptions for rape or incest victims; there would be no rhetoric about risk-taking or sluttiness or refraining from sex if you don’t want any children.

  27. I realize, OHNOES, that a big part of the reason that people don’t want Plan B available over the counter is that they feel it will undermine their attempts to stigmatize casual sex. But the thing is, I personally firmly disagree with the “law as a moral teacher” view of what government ought to be doing. I believe government’s proper place is to protect people’s rights and to provide certain services that are more effectively provided publically than privately. It should only be in the business of discouraging a small subset of immoral acts: those which can be reasonably enforced without undue intrusion into privacy (and in most cases this means not the “victimless” ones). So, whether Plan B in particular, or casual sex in general, is properly stigmatized isn’t the government’s proper business.

    The flip side of that is that I very much don’t believe that what should be legal should mark the boundary of what should be considered moral, and I’m very much in favor of socially stigmatizing some things which aren’t the government’s business to discourage.

  28. OHNOES – The Supreme Court struck down the law requiring a married woman to get her husband’s permission before getting an abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The majority of justices ruled that most women would probably consult with their husbands anyway, and that the law would hurt women in abusive relationships. As far as I know, there aren’t any laws saying that a woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock have to get her boyfriend’s permission. It’s all about a woman submitting her autonomy to her husband upon marriage; the Three Bonds of Obedience in ancient China dictate that a woman submits to her father as a girl, to her husband as a wife and to her sons as a widow. It may not be law anymore, but the sentiment is very much alive today.
    However, if the sentiment of a law allowing a man to veto a woman’s decision to have an abortion is that “half of the baby is him so he gets to decide”, then it draws no distinction between a loving husband and a rapist. I think that law would be a mess. Even if it did protect women against rapists or batterers, it would be incumbent on her to prove that the baby was a product of rape or an abusive relationship, and considering how second/third trimester abortions are restricted, she would not have much time to do it. What if it was acquaintance rape or marital rape, and the father was her boyfriend or husband, but he had raped her? It’s likely that she wouldn’t get a waiver in that case. Or what if it’s an extreme medical circumstance like the woman would be permanently disabled or the baby is dead/deformed to the point of not being viable, and the father tells her she has to go through the back aches, mood swings and labor anyway? And I see no reason that he can’t just say “I forbid you to have an abortion” and then walk away during the pregnancy and afterwards.
    I’m not pro-choice, but I believe that abortion should be an option in extreme circumstances for all pregnant women, regardless of her marital status or age. And in my opinion, most women would talk to their husbands and most young girls would talk to their parents in reasonable circumstances, so spousal/parental consent laws would mostly hurt those who would be discouraged by extreme circumstances from talking.

  29. I’m pretty sure that’s how the system works

    If you’re not sure, why go on as if you did?

    The way the system works is that once the child is born, both parents have legal and financial responsibility for that child. You may note that men do not have to pay “fetus support,” and that the law does not say that only men have to pay child support.

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