Weighty Issues about Plan B

In April 2013, a federal judge ruled that Plan B (the morning-after pill) could be sold over-the-counter to a customer of any age. The Obama Administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided in June 2013 to drop the Department of Justice’s appeal of the ruling thereby allowing girls and women to purchase Plan B at their local pharmacy without a doctor’s consultation or prescription.

Pro-family groups like Concerned Women for America denounced this reckless move out of concern for the health and safety of girls and women.

As Penny Nance, CEO and President of Concerned Women for America, points out, “Plan B contains 40 times the dosage of Levonorgestrel, the same drug used in other forms of birth control.”

Photo Credit: ABCNews.com

That is a tremendous amount of Levonorgestrel, and yet an interesting new finding from a European manufacturer of a product identical to Plan B shows that the drug loses effectiveness in women who weigh 165-175 pounds and does not work for women who weigh more than 176 pounds.

This information was published in "Mother Jones," a left-wing magazine. The writer reached out to Teva Pharmaceuticals, U.S. manufacturer of Plan B One Step, about whether the company will be changing its product information to alert girls and women about the weight limit, but Teva’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study published in 2012 reports that the average weight of American women over the age of 20 is 166.2 pounds. Also, as young women focus more on being fit, they are weighing more since muscle mass increases weight at the same time that it makes a person strong and healthy.

The average 20-year-old American woman weighs 166.2 pounds. A European study warns that the over-the-counter "morning after pill" is not as effective in women more than 165 pounds. Credit: Toby Talbot/AP

The "Mother Jones"article quotes a spokeswoman from HRA Pharma, the French manufacturer of the European morning-after drug, Norlevo, as saying, "A dose increase of levonorgestrel is not proven to be a solution for this problem." HRA Pharma is changing the packaging information to reflect the drug’s ineffectiveness in heavier women. It is not known whether American manufacturers will take the same step.

President Obama’s Administration decided the morning-after pill should be available over-the-counter to any girl or woman who wants to take it (and consequently, by the way, to men who wish to purchase it for nefarious purposes) regardless of any short- or long-term consequences of taking a drug 40 times more potent than birth control pills.

Will Obama’s Administration now make sure those women and girls know that loading their bodies with this high-dose drug will be ineffective for half of them?

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