News

By Hilary White

WASHINGTON, June 13, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – For five years, the radically pro-abortion lobby group, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), has been petitioning the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the abortifacient morning after pill, Plan B, to be dispensed as an over-the-counter drug without a doctor’s prescription or supervision. Now the FDA has announced that the petition has been rejected.

The announcement came June 9th and the CRR is now demanding a deposition from former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Mark B. McClellan, to explain why the petition has been denied. The Center, an organization working to expand abortion in every area of the world, petitioned the FDA five years ago and wants to know why the decision took so long.

CRR President, Nancy Northup, said her group will not stop pushing for the drug to be made more widely available. “We are now more determined than ever to use the courts to force the FDA to do its job and make Plan B available without prescription,” Northup said in a CRR media release, published without comment by YahooNews.

Simon Heller, staff attorney at the CRR and lead attorney in the case, said about the FDA’s decision that, “The FDA, in the thrall of the Bush administration’s anti-science agenda, has put aside its mission to promote public health in favour of depriving women of easier access to this important drug.”

The CRR is notorious for the militancy of its abortion advocacy, especially in Latin America, where the Catholic Church replaces President Bush and his administration as their iconic villain “oppressing women’s rights”. The CRR has openly advocated deception, coercion and campaigns of public “disinformation” to obtain their goals.

A leaked 2004 CRR memo explained the strategy for overcoming the American opposition: “There is a stealth quality to our work: We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower-profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus.”

In a speech in New York in 2005, CRR activist Monica Roa admitted that the CRR uses a deliberate campaign of deception and coercion to force governments to legalize abortion in Latin America. One admirer who attended the speech called her a “one woman dis-information campaign.”

The FDA media office did not return calls by press time.