Good News in Reproductive Health

An FDA panel of 11 people, nine of whom are women, has unanimously recommended that the FDA approve Ella, a government-developed drug that can prevent pregnancy for up to five days after unprotected PIV sex.

[Ella] appears to be more effective than Plan B, a morning-after pill now available over the counter to women 18 and older that gradually loses efficacy after intercourse and can be taken at latest three days after sex. Ella, by contrast, works just as well on the fifth day as the first after sex.

Ella blocks the effects of progesterone, a female hormone that spurs ovulation. It is a chemical relative to RU-486, the abortion pill.

If approved for sale, Ella would first be made available only by prescription. Plan B has now been available without a prescription since 2006.

Naturally, there had to be some bullshit at the hearing:

[S]ome mystery remains over exactly how it works. That mystery spurred a fierce debate outside the committee over whether it should be considered an abortion drug, a debate that prompted the posting of several uniformed police officers around the meeting room.

…The dispute is whether the drug works by delaying ovulation (as the pill's manufacturer claims) or by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting itself in the uterus (as anti-abortion advocates say).

Dr. Jeffrey Bray, a pharmacologist at the Food and Drug Administration, said that ella may do both.

…Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group, called ella an unsafe abortion pill that men might slip to unsuspecting women.

"With ella, women will be enticed to buy a poorly tested abortion pill in the guise of a morning-after pill," she said.

Well, if the president of Hand-Wringing Misogynists of America says it, it must be true! Fuck you, SCIENCE!

By the way, with regard to Wright's claim that "men might slip Ella to unsuspecting women," like everything else, she's got it precisely backwards: Reproductive coercion is a serious and insufficiently addressed problem, but the central issue is not men who try to keep their partners from getting pregnant; it's men who sabotage their partners' birth control in order that they become pregnant and thus connected for life if a child is born.

If Wright were really concerned about women, and of course she isn't, she would support making available every option for women to terminate unwanted pregnancies, which include those caused by partner abuse.

[H/T to Shaker Samanthab.]