Abortion news that makes you say "Hmmm..."

Bet you won't read this in your morning paper:

A leading expert on the morning after pill admitted at a National Press Club forum [Tuesday] that "real world" experience of easy access to the drug has not reduced the numbers of pregnancies or abortions.

Kirsten Moore, president and CEO of Reproductive Health Technologies Project, there is no evidence that easy access to the morning-after pill reduces pregnancies or abortions, as pro-abortion groups have claimed.

The claim has been a rallying point for abortion advocates who want the FDA to approve the drug, which sometimes causes an abortion, for over the counter sale and wants mandates forcing pharmacists to fill prescriptions for it.

"I think it's an honest question, the experts had estimated that we would see a drop by up to half in the rates of unintended pregnancy and the rates of abortion. And in fact in the real world we're not seeing that," Moore said.
. . .
Advocates for Plan B have based their claim on a hypothesis asserted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. Yet studies, including one by a Planned Parenthood medical director in San Francisco, find the morning after pill does not reduce abortion and pregnancy rates the way AGI claimed.

The Reproductive Health Technologies Project, by the way, is obviously a huge advocate for the morning-after pill, so this admission should carry significant weight. Wendy Wright, the executive vice president of Concerned Women for America and one of the panelists with Moore, said "the studies she's seen show an increase in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases, which the drug is not intended to prevent."

So to sum up, we have no reduction in pregnancies, no reduction in abortions, and an increase in STDs. But the FDA -- and by extension, the stomp-on-women's-rights Bush administration -- is forcing the religious right down our throat by denying over-the-counter availability? Sounds like good science to me.