Obama Administration Forces Military Hospitals to Stock Morning After Pill
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 5, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Late Thursday, the Obama administration issued a new order for the U.S. military requiring all military hospitals and health centers to stock the morning after pill. The Department of Defense will soon begin having military medical facilities stock the Plan B drug, which can sometimes cause an abortion.
The Obama administration’s decision came after the Pentagon’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, an advisory panel, made the recommendation to stock the drug.
The PPTC suggested stocking both Plan B and the Next Choice generic of the morning after pill.
The decision is the latest to have President Barack Obama overturning pro-life policies during the Bush administration and follows him forcing Americans to pay for abortions and embryonic stem cell research with their tax dollars.
Obama’s decision is not going over well with Wendy Wright, the president of Concerned Women for America.
"The military needs to focus on its prime mission, yet leftists view it as a means to promote their agenda," she told LifeNews.com. "The morning-after pill is highly ineffective in preventing pregnancies and completely useless in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases. But it’s a political tool for abortion advocates."
Wright worries the decision is the first step to pushing abortions at military hospitals.
"By making this drug required, the next step will making drugs like RU-486, the abortion pill, mandatory," she said. "And doctors or pharmacists who have objections will be purged from the ranks."
"The military needs to focus on discipline and proper behavior – because lives depend on it – not promoting risky behavior," Wright continued.
Nancy Keenan of NARAL, a national pro-abortion group, lobbied the Obama administration to overturn the policy and applauded the decision to do so.
"It’s a tragedy that women in uniform have been denied such basic health care," she said in a statement. "We applaud the medical experts for standing up for military women."
Keenan said the more than 350,000 women in the military would be benefited by the decision.
But Jeanne Monahan, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, told the Washington Post she also disagreed with the decision.
"It can prevent the embryo from implanting and therefore destroy a human life," she said.
"Women serving in the military deserve to know the truth about their medications. Because this can be the difference between preventing and destroying life, a requirement to carry this drug could violate the conscience rights of military personnel who have moral objections," Monahan continued.
Wright also worries the military will eventually promote Ellaone, a new drug that is billed as a morning after pill that works up to 5 days after sex, but, in reality, is an abortion drug.
"A new drug similar to RU-486 can reportedly be used as a ‘morning-after pill’. So designating the morning-after pill as required to stock, and easy to obtain, may open the door for an abortion pill – which undisputedly kills an unborn child and can be extremely dangerous to the mother – to fit in that category," she concludes.
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