Officials Drop Plan to Ban Contraceptive

Under fire from women’s rights organizations and state health officials, San Bernardino County officials abandoned their campaign Tuesday to end the distribution of morning-after contraceptive pills in county health clinics.

The Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 not to appeal a Los Angeles-based nonprofit health care agency’s decision to block their proposal.

An appeal would have gone to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and would have forced an important test of the Bush administration’s stance on family planning. Instead--though the board reserved the right to revisit the issue--the controversial proposal has been quietly set aside.

Jon Dunn, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties, called it “a victory for the women of San Bernardino County. . . . Unintentional pregnancies will be avoided. Abortions will be reduced. And that was the outcome we were seeking.”

The decision, however, caught backers of the county’s proposal--who see morning-after pills as a form of abortion, though most members of the mainstream health community disagree--by surprise.

“It is a disappointment,” said Jenny Biondi, executive director of the Pasadena-based Right to Life League of Southern California, one of the antiabortion groups across the nation that have been following the debate in San Bernardino County. “This is crazy. It’s crazy medication.”

San Bernardino County Supervisor Bill Postmus, a social conservative, key supporter of the proposal and one of the two supervisors who voted to continue with the appeal Tuesday, also disagreed with the board’s decision.

Though the conservatives who dominate the board had done little to mask their feelings about abortion, Postmus said after the vote that the issue had been about community standards and local control--two notions, he said, held dear by the Bush administration.

“I am disappointed by the board’s action today, which I believe to be a disservice to families and counties throughout the nation,” Postmus said in a prepared statement. “It would be in the best interests of families and of all counties for the Board of Supervisors to appeal . . . to the new administration in Washington.”

Earlier this spring, county officials sought to ban the morning-after pills. The bid came in the form of a waiver request because the county receives federal funding for family planning--and by state and federal law, morning-after pills must be made available at public clinics that receive that money.

Unlike the more controversial RU-486, which expels an embryo, morning-after pills are heavy doses of birth control that typically suppress ovulation or prevent a fertilized egg from nesting in the uterine wall.

The medical community considers the morning-after pill a important method of reducing unplanned pregnancies. Doctors say the pill will prevent 1.7 million pregnancies this year, and, subsequently, 800,000 abortions.

What’s more, the pills are considered so commonplace that the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a national coalition of women physicians, has asked doctors to provide advance prescriptions for them during routine gynecologic visits.

However, some view the pills as akin to abortion, and believe the government should not pay for them.

Though most of the pills distributed in San Bernardino County clinics last year were given to poor adult women without insurance, most county supervisors said they were concerned that the pills are periodically given to minors, and decided to pursue the request banning distribution of the pill in county health clinics.

Biondi said the debate over the pill has been warped in an ongoing efforts by abortion rights supporters to redefine pregnancy--to persuade the public and the government that pregnancy begins at implantation, not fertilization.

“That is a new definition we are not accepting,” she said. “This pill has abortion qualities.”