On Monday evening, the Obama Administration announced that it will stop fighting to impose age restrictions on over-the-counter emergency contraception, making Plan B available without a prescription to women of all ages. While women’s health groups lauded the decision as a common-sense move, social conservatives claim that the White House has endangered the young girls who become impregnated by sexual predators.

There’s no scientifically-motivated reason to restrict Plan B, an extremely safe medication that the FDA has approved for girls of all ages. But conservatives have consistently claimed that allowing teens to buy emergency contraception over the counter will harm America’s youth. And in the aftermath of the Obama Administration’s announcement, the right-wing media has also attempted to link contraceptive access with sexual abuse against women, claiming that allowing young teens to purchase Plan B without needing to ask their parents will embolden rapists.

“It’s a good deal for pedophiles, a good deal for people who commit statutory rape against young girls,” conservative radio host Laura Ingraham told Fox News on Tuesday. “if mothers and fathers across this country hear this and they think, ‘Well, I guess my daughter or her boyfriend or her rapist can go out to a pharmacy and get a bunch of, you know, hormone pills to give a little girl.’ We don’t really know the effect of a spiking or dropping a little girl’s — in many cases a young woman’s or a little girl’s hormonal levels. It’s outrageous!”

Similarly, the right-wing National Review Online (NRO) published a post on Tuesday entitled “Real-World Morning-After Pill Consequences,” highlighting the story of a mother who worked to protect her 11-year-old daughter from a sexual predator. Even though that story didn’t involve contraception at all, the NRO concludes it has important implications “in the context” of offering Plan B over the counter. “It will be yet another way in which parents could be kept in the dark about what is happening to their own children, perhaps even when they are victims of sexual predation. Truly sickening,” the NRO’s Welsey J. Smith writes.

This line of reasoning isn’t new. The right-wing Family Research Council has been repeatedly pushing sexual abuse as one of its reasons for opposing giving more young women access to emergency contraception. Last month, in a statement supporting the Obama Administration’s decision to prolong the legal fight to restrict access to Plan B, the group claimed, “Additionally alarming is that Plan B ‘access’ advocates ignore the fact that doctors and parents are often the first line of defense for girls who are being sexually abused. Removing doctors and parents from the equation will make it much easier for predators to conceal sexual abuse and to force the drug’s use on minors.”

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The Justice Department announced on Monday that it will allow the most popular morning after pill, Plan B, to be available over the counter to women of all ages, dropping its appeal of a federal court order.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a statement that it has “asked the manufacturer of Plan B One-Step to submit a supplemental application seeking approval of the one-pill product to be made available O.T.C. without any such restrictions” and “intends to approve it promptly.” Generic versions may also be eventually approved. The morning after pill prevents conception “if taken within 72 hours after sexual intercourse.”

The decision comes after a federal judge in April ordered the FDA to lift restrictions on the morning-after pill. The administration responded to the ruling by lowering the age restriction from 17 to 15, sparking the ire of health groups and district Judge Edward Korman, who, in a series of contemptuous opinions, called the administration’s defiance an insult to the intelligence of women” and “a charade” meant to stall his original order. Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the administration to make two-pill versions of emergency contraception immediately available over the counter to women of all ages.

Women’s health groups embraced the administrations’ decision on Monday, calling it a “huge breakthrough for access to birth control and a historic moment for women’s health and equity.” “The FDA’s decision will make emergency contraception available on store shelves, just like condoms, and women of all ages will be able to get it quickly in order to prevent unintended pregnancy,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards said in a statement.

Medical experts have consistently argued that the administration’s arbitrary age limits have no basis in scientific research, as multiple studies have found Plan B to be safer than aspirin for all ages. In December 2011, the FDA approved Plan B for over the counter use for all women, but amended its policy after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the agency, claiming that “the manufacturer had failed to study whether the drug was safe for girls as young as 11.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a national organization representing thousands of women’s health experts, has publicly come out against the state-level abortion restrictions that impact the way doctors are allowed to treat their patients. The group’s Executive Board has issued an official statement opposing all laws that “unduly interfere with patient-physician relationships” and compromise patients’ health care for political gain.

“Given the relentless legislative assault on the patient-physician relationship that we’ve seen in the past few years — and unfortunately continue to see — we were compelled to issue a formal Statement of Policy,” the group’s president, Dr. Jeanne A. Conry, explained in a press release. “A disproportionate number of these types of laws are aimed at women’s reproductive rights and the physicians that provide women’s health care services.”

In its formal statement, the doctors’ group criticized specific pieces of anti-abortion legislation that comes between women and their doctors — including forced ultrasound laws that require women seeking abortions to look at an image of their fetus before continuing with the medical procedure, “disclosure” laws that require doctors to tell women about the scientifically disputed link between abortion and breast cancer, and laws that require doctors to use an outdated procedure for administering the abortion pill.

The OB-GYNs point out that these type of laws allow legislators, instead of doctors, to set medical protocol. When doctors aren’t allowed to follow the current accepted medical practice because of a politically-motivated law, they aren’t able to provide their patients with the best quality of care. That dynamic has contributed to a serious shortage of women’s health doctors in states with harsh abortion restrictions, since medical professionals would rather avoid situations in which they may have to choose between providing their patients with the best health care and following a complicated state law.

“We are speaking out not just on behalf of OB-GYNs, but for all physicians and patients,” Dr. Conry noted. “Many of these laws are dangerous to patients’ health and safety. As physicians, we are obligated to offer the best evidence-based care to our patients. Government should stay out of imposing its political agenda on medical practice.”

This isn’t the first time that the College has weighed in on an area of women’s health that has become overly politicized by elected officials. Last fall, the group came out in support of improving women’s access to birth control by allowing them to buy it over the counter. It has repeatedly encouraged doctors to help reduce unintended pregnancies by providing teens with long-lasting contraception like IUDs. And, as the Obama Administration has continued to advocate imposing age restrictions on over-the-counter emergency contraception, OB-GYNs have reiterated that they don’t support preventing young teens from buying Plan B without a prescription.

The Obama administration’s crusade to block over-the-counter access to emergency contraception for women of all ages has hit yet another road block. On Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the administration to make two-pill versions of emergency contraception immediately available over the counter to women of all ages. The court will, however, hear arguments on limiting access to one-pill emergency contraception, including the popular Plan B One-Step.

In April, district Judge Edward Korman ordered the FDA to immediately lift restrictions on the morning-after pill. The Obama administration resisted, instead going forward with a more limited plan to lower the eligible age from 17 to 15. In a series of contemptuous opinions, Korman called the Obama administration’s defiance “an insult to the intelligence of women” and “a charade” meant to stall his original order.

Gynecologists and medical experts have watched the political scuffle over emergency contraception with bemusement, as the administration’s arbitrary age restriction on the medication has no grounding in science. The morning-after pill is actually safer than aspirin, according to extensive research.

What’s more, the age restriction would have likely driven up prices and left many older women unable to buy the contraception if they couldn’t show a government-issued ID proving their age.

If the administration wants to continue this deeply unpopular battle, they will now have to appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Republican nominee for Massachusetts’ senate seat refuses to say whether he supports the Blunt Amendment — a measure that would allow employers to choose to deny their employees insurance coverage for contraception costs.

Gabriel Gomez has reportedly been asked several times by reporters whether he would vote for the amendment, and each time has avoided answering. At a press conference Thursday, he once again ducked: “I’m not sure how much more clear I can be,” he began. He then offered an answer that avoided the question of voting entirely. “Contraception should be available over the counter,” he said. “They should take the politics out of it. And they should take the pharmaceutical companies out of it.”

This echoes an op-ed by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) calling for over-the-counter contraception access. While this could help to de-politicize contraceptive care, it doesn’t help with the prohibitively high costs of some contraception that, despite Gomez’s claim to the contrary, can be arbitrarily enforced by pharmaceutical companies. It also avoids the issue of how to deal with intrauterine devices, or IUDs, which are the most effective form of birth control but require administration by a gynecologist.

Gomez, though trying to portray himself as a moderate, still holds conservative views on women’s reproductive issues as a whole. He opposes the use of public funds to pay for abortion — something that is already illegal, but which Republicans use as a launching point to advocate against funding Planned Parenthood’s preventative services. He has also advocated for giving religious organizations full exemption from covering contraception. Earlier this month, Gomez told a reporter at the Boston Globe, “Honestly, I haven’t read the Blunt Amendment.”

Republican Party of Virginia Treasurer Bob FitzSimmonds, a former aide to and “very close friend” of gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli II (R), told Virginia blogger Ben Tribbett that he is “not a big fan of contraception, frankly.”

FitzSimmonds — who was Cuccinelli’s legislative director during his time in the Virginia Senate, as well as a multiple-time state senate candidate himself — is the former executive director of what is now the Care Net Pregnancy Help Center and the former chair of the Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center Directors Association. Crisis Pregnancy Centers are faith-based operations that seek to discourage pregnant women from considering abortion. He created an abstinence-only curriculum for area schools called the “Keep It Simple Say NO abstinence program“.

At last weekend’s state party convention, Tribbett asked FitzSimmon whether he supported the distribution of emergency contraception on college campuses. “I’m not a big fan of contraception, frankly,” the Republican Party official explained. “I think there are some issues, we’re giving morning-after pills to 12-year-olds, and pretty soon I guess we’ll hand them out to babies, I don’t know.”

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FitzSimmonds also told Tribbett that sex education has caused the spread of sexually transmitted diseases: “I believe that we don’t recognize the causal effect between the type of sex education that we’ve been giving and the spread of STDs. We focus on things like abortion, cause it’s a big pressure thing. I go into schools 15-20 times a year, I run a non-profit that goes into schools and talks to kids about sex. They’re all abortion and HIV. HIV’s kind of hard to catch. Abortion happens if you get pregnant. But we’re on the track for 50 percent of the American people to have Herpes by the time these kids are my age. And that is a profound — not only health but sociological crisis facing this country.”

FitzSimmonds posted on his Facebook page shortly after last November’s election, “When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say ‘This is all Bush’s fault.’”

(HT: BlueVirginia)

This month, the political fight over emergency contraception has intensified, as the Obama administration continues to resist making the morning after pill available to women of all ages over the counter. After a federal judge ordered the FDA to remove all age restrictions on emergency contraception, the administration disagreed, maintaining that girls under 15 years old should still be required be obtain a prescription to purchase the contraceptive method — a position that baffles medical experts.

At the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ recent annual meeting, MedPage Today asked women’s health experts what they thought of the ongoing fight over Plan B. Multiple medical experts went on record to say that they don’t understand why emergency contraception has been such a contentious issue, and they don’t support restricting it for younger teens:

– Owen Montgomery, MD: “I would much rather have a 13- to 14-year-old girl who needs emergency contraception have access to it than come to my office with an unwanted pregnancy… In our clinics in the university, we see lots and lots of teenagers. And many of these young ladies have no access to good parental role models, and they need access to emergency contraception when they need access. And they can’t wait for permission from a judge, or someone else of authority.”

– Alison Edelman, MD, MPH, of Oregon Health & Science University: “Emergency contraception is a really, really important part of our toolkit for contraception. It helps women who have emergencies, i.e., they aren’t using contraception at the time of sexual activity or they had a misstep with their contraception, like a condom break or slip.”

– Barbara S. Levy, MD, ACOG’s vice president for health policy: “There’s failure of other methods. There are rapes. There are other things that occur. Women need to be able to access emergency contraception and have the knowledge and understanding of how to use it, so we can prevent unwanted pregnancies and unintended pregnancies that happen, because life happens.”

– Laurie J. McKenzie, MD, of both the University of Texas and Baylor College of Medicine: “I find it very interesting that there are these concessions that are being made in terms of age limitation … There are more deaths associated with Tylenol overdose than there are with oral contraceptive overdoses or potential overdose with Plan B. There have never, to my knowledge, been any overdoses with hormonal contraception.”

– Eve Espey, MD, MPH, of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque: “Plan B should be over the counter… All emergency contraceptives should be over the counter with no age restrictions.”

Indeed, there’s no scientific basis for imposing an age limit on Plan B. Multiple medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have expressed support for making emergency contraception easily accessible to women of all ages.

Developing nations around the world aren’t doing enough to ensure that women have access to the family planning services they need, a new report from the Guttmacher Institute finds. The women who want to prevent pregnancy but don’t have access to modern forms of birth control are concentrated mostly in poorer countries, and those countries are lagging far behind wealthier nations when it comes to ensuring women’s ability to use the contraceptive services of their choice.

And the problem is getting worse. Between 2003 and 2012, the total number of women in need of birth control because they wanted to avoid pregnancy increased from 716 million to 867 million — and most of that growth was among women in the 69 poorest countries, where birth control is already more difficult to come by. About 222 million women in developing countries want to use birth control but aren’t currently able to access a modern contraceptive method, and nearly three quarters of those women live in the world’s poorest countries.

“Unless the adequacy of family planning services improves more rapidly than it has in the past decade, he number of women with an unmet need for modern contraceptives will continue to rise, especially in the 69 poorest countries,” Jacqueline E. Darroch, one of the study’s authors, explained in a statement.

Last year, the United Nations declared access to contraception to be a “universal human right.” But that right isn’t being realized for millions of women around the world — and the continued failure to ensure better access to modern birth control results in serious consequences for women in developing nations. Higher rates of unintended pregnancies lead to higher rates of preventable deaths from unsafe abortions, as well as higher rates of infant deaths around the world. Furthermore, giving women the family planning resources they need is an important step toward helping those women achieve economic success and independence.

Unfortunately, persistent class divides plague contraception access even in wealthy nations. Here in the United States, poorer women still struggle to access the birth control method of their choice — and research has demonstrated that when cost barriers are removed, those low-income women choose more effective methods than they would have otherwise.

North Carolina is advancing a measure that would effectively allow personal beliefs to trump women’s access to birth control. Under HB 730, employers in the state could decide not to include contraceptives in their workers’ insurance plans for any reason — a direct violation of the popular Obamacare provision that stipulates women should receive birth control coverage at no additional cost to them. But as lawmakers debate HB 730, women’s health advocates in the state want them to know they’re not willing to be dragged back to the 1960s without a fight.

“We love a good vintage look — but not when it’s running the state legislature,” the local Planned Parenthood affiliate explained in a press release. That’s why Planned Parenthood supporters dressed up in 1960s clothing to attend a House committee hearing about HB 730 on Wednesday.

The 1960s apparel is intended to communicate that state lawmakers are trying to turn back the clock to past decades, when women didn’t have the freedom to control their own reproductive decisions. Planned Parenthood raised awareness about HB 703 with a Mad Men-themed event in advance of the committee hearing, and then sent dozens of vintage-garbed supporters to Wednesday’s debate (all photos courtesy of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Central North Carolina):

“We like watching Mad Men — but we don’t want to live in it,” Paige Johnson, the president of public affairs for the Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, pointed out. “Women’s preventive care — including birth control — is basic health care. Politicians and bosses have no business denying women access to this basic health care. This shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea, but unfortunately it is to some.”

North Carolina lawmakers aren’t the only ones to consider a foray into 1960s-esque policies. Even though a similar law in Missouri allowing employers to deny birth control coverage was recently struck down by a federal judge, that hasn’t stopped other states from attempting the same method to restrict women’s access to affordable birth control.

And unfortunately for the women in North Carolina, this is hardly the only measure currently being considered in the legislature that could pose a threat to women’s health. State lawmakers are also considering including biased misinformation about abortion in sex ed classes, imposing unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics that could force them to close, and forcing teens to get a notarized note from their parents before getting tested or treated for STDs.