FDA rejected contraception for political reasons

doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7542.624-b

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Janice Hopkins Tanne

News York

The US Food and Drug Administration “created a regulatory catch 22 to justify the predetermined political decision to block over the counter sales of [the emergency contraceptive] Plan B [levonorgestrel],” representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, claimed last week.

He sent a seven page letter relying on “previously undisclosed documents” to Andrew von Eschenbach, the acting commissioner of the FDA. In the letter he charges that the FDA “created the situation it now protests as too complex to solve” and “seriously mischaracterised …