To: National Desk
Contact: Ann Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League, 773-777-2900, cell 312-965-1030
Chicago, May 10—”The ACOG ‘Ask Me’ campaign is aimed at pressuring the FDA to approve of Plan B, the morning-after pill for over the counter sale.” said Ann Scheidler, Executive Director of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, “not an effort to provide quality health care for women.”
“The suggestion that all women of child-bearing age should have a prescription at the ready for ’emergency contraception’ is an insult,” said Scheidler. The nation’s OB/Gyn’s are acting as if fertility is a virus and that women need to treat it as an illness rather than a healthy condition.”
On Monday the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists announced their plan to encourage women to get an advance prescription for the “morning-after pill.” Part of the campaign is to post “Ask Me” notices in doctors’ offices, to urge doctors to ask women if they want the prescription.
“ACOG sounds like a marketing agency for a prostitution ring,” said Scheidler. “Their patients are all women. The doctors should help women recognize the beauty of their gift of fertility, not treat it like the plague.”
“Making this anti-child, anti-woman announcement just days before the nation celebrates Mother’s Day is a further insult to women,” Scheidler said. “Health care providers owe women a dignity and respect that is glaringly absent in their assumption that women consider sexual intimacy an ‘accident’ or an ’emergency.'”
“And ACOG is putting women at risk on several levels,” said Scheidler. “In a true emergency rape situation, a women should be advised to go directly to a hospital or to the police and get proper treatment.”
“There is apparently no limit on the dispensing of this drug,” said Scheidler. “What are the long-term health effects?”
“In addition,” noted Scheidler, “this drug can act as an abortifiacient, according to the manufacturer. So, rather than reduce abortions, it probably results in an increase in abortion. Yet there would be no way for a woman to know whether she had conceived or not.”
“We urge women to reject ACOG’s insulting proposal and to inform their own physicians that they take the ‘Ask Me’ campaign as an affront to all women,” said Scheidler.
