Shell Game/credit: The Hamptons

New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris reported this morning, with the help of St. Louis Post-Dispatch medical writer Blythe Bernhard, Wednesday’s news concerning the FDA decision to make available Plan B morning-after pills to seventeen-year-olds.

There are arguments against this FDA decision, of course, some of them outlined in the story. Harris soon reminds us, for instance, that “[s]ince November 2006, when it became widely available to women 18 and older without a prescription, Plan B has had no measurable effect on the nation’s abortion or teenage pregnancy rates.”

So, one wonders, why would seventeen-year-olds go to the trouble of getting Plan B when the eighteen-and-older crowd can’t be bothered?

Sam Lee finds it disturbing that no parental consent is needed, nor is there a prescription. No oversight, in other words. Wendy Wright (Concerned Women for America) agrees, concerned about the “safety of minors”. Minors left all alone with their rights, I…

I’m still chuckling about St. Joseph’s record number of comments from Kim Wallis’s recent post. I’m a cradle Catholic and didn’t know about this custom until I was somewhere in my forties! Go figure.

For your perusal I’m offering today nine of the ninety-two links sent out in today’s Morning Edition, a daily news service we provide for Catholic leaders:

1.) Bishop Joseph Nauman, originally from St. Louis and now in Kansas City, Kansas, has been making news lately. He wrote in his most recent column,

“My May 9 column, making public my request to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius not to present herself for reception of holy Communion until she had sought to repair the public scandal of her long-standing support for legalized abortion, not surprisingly has initiated quite a bit of discussion in secular newspapers, local talk radio shows and coffee-break conversations…..” Read the full column here.

2.) The UK Telegraph newspaper online tells…