A new form of emergency contraception is attempting to gain approval to be sold to women in the United States, and as you may expect, it’s meeting a fair amount of controversy while waiting to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The new drug, called ella, can prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex for up to 5 days, and seems to be more effective than Plan B, the currently available form of emergency contraception.

But the drug is, of course, rankling those opposed to women having any type of control over both their bodies and their medical decisions. Anti-choicers have already begun to compare the new drug to medications that induce abortion in an obvious attempt to misinform the public of the drug’s intended use. From Wendy Wright, of anti-choice group Concerned Women of America:

“With [ella], women will be enticed to buy a poorly tested abortion drug, unaware of its medical risks, under the guise that it’s a morning-after pill.”

The linked article also mentions that opponents of ella are explicitly concerned that women will attempt to use it as an abortion pill. I don’t mean to sound glib or sarcastic here, but if the FDA began to block medications because they thought that someone might use them for something other than the intended use, very few medications would actually be available (and certainly things like painkillers, Viagra, and even Tylenol PM would be banned, as these are all drugs that people use for reasons other than their intended purpose, rightly or wrongly).

This is just another example of anti-choicers attempting to frame an argument in a way that takes a fairly non-controversial thing and makes it controversial. Unfortunately, these groups are quite good at doing this… which is why the FDA’s long delay in making Plan B more readily available will probably be repeated in this situation. And, as is usually the case, the people who are in need of this medication the most will be the ones who have to pay the price of political grandstanding.

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