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…