Never mind the science.

Byline: The Register-Guard

There was a time not so long ago when Americans simply trusted that no matter which party held the White House, agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration would continue to base decisions on traditional peer-reviewed scientific data.

The Bush administration has made such trust seem quaintly naive. Nowhere is the evidence of political meddling with the scientific process more disturbing than in the FDA's transparently trumped up refusal to allow women over-the-counter access to emergency contraception.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, confirms that the FDA's political appointees repeatedly overruled agency scientists in the emergency contraception approval process.

It's important to remember why easy access to emergency contraception is vital for women. There are more than 3 million unplanned pregnancies annually in the United States, and more than a million abortions. The FDA's own studies indicated that widespread over-the-counter availability of Plan B could cut the number of unwanted pregnancies in half.

Since up to half of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, the effect on the abortion rate is obvious: Plan B could significantly lower the number of abortions performed in the United States. That's what makes opposition to Plan B by anti-abortion radicals so self-defeating.

The GAO report suggests the Plan B decisions at the top levels of the FDA are covered with the fingerprints of anti-abortion and abstinence-only ideologues within the Bush administration. FDA scientists told the GAO investigators that approval of Plan B was hijacked by the FDA's upper-level political appointees from the start.

After reviewing 40 studies and 15,000 pages of research, three separate FDA offices in 2003 overwhelmingly recommended approval of Barr Laboratories' application to sell Plan B over the counter. It became obvious to FDA scientists that the fix was in when they were notified by top management in early 2004 - before some final studies were concluded - that easing access to Plan B "could not be approved."

The heads of the FDA offices that approved Barr's application refused to sign the agency's letter denying over-the-counter sales. The FDA director's continuing obstruction of access to Plan B led finally to the resignation in August of Susan F. Wood, head of the FDA's office on women's health.

There are no winners here, even among religious conservatives who mistakenly think they've prevented over-the-counter access to a thinly veiled abortion pill or a contraceptive that would have promoted teenage promiscuity. Their "victory" came at the cost of the FDA's credibility and the loss of a chance to demonstrably reduce the number of U.S. abortions. Americans can't afford many such victories.