February 07, 2010

The Department of Defense has reported that the morning-after pill will now be available at all of its hospitals and health clinics around the world. The decision was recommended by the Pentagon's Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, which had voted to include Plan B and the generic Next Choice on the list of drugs that all military facilities should stock. The Pentagon accepted the committee's recommendation. Nancy Keenan from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which estimates that this decision will affect 350,000 women in the military, said, "It's a tragedy that women in uniform have been denied such basic health care. We applaud the medical experts for standing up for military women."

The same panel made a similar recommendation in 2002, when George W. Bush was president, but the policy was never implemented. This decision to allow the morning-after pill is the latest the Obama administration has made in reversing women's health policies that were implemented by George W. Bush. The Obama administration has already overturned a federal regulation that would expand the ability of health care workers to deny care they found morally objectionable (including abortion and Plan B), he's lifted federal restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research, and he overturned the policy (sometimes referred to as the "global gag rule") that forced international family-planning groups to not perform nor promote the option of abortion services if they wanted to receive any federal funding. (Full Story)