by Susan F. Wood, a women’s health expert who resigned in 2005 from the protest of the Food and Drug Administration, who accused the Agency of Knuckkling under the political by not making a freely available sale of the morning after pill, known as Plan B, Die on January 17 in her house in London. She was 66.
The cause was Glioblastoma Multiforme, a brain cancer, said Richard Payne, her husband.
Dr. Wood was an assistant commissioner for Women’s Health at the FDA during the presidency of George W. Bush when Plan B, a form of emergency anti -control, became a flash point in the abortion wars.
In 2003, an FDA advice panel voted 28-0 that the pill was safe for non-recipe use. But senior officials from the agency ignored the precedent and refused to approve freely available sale.
Plan B contains high levels of progestine, a hormone that is found in normal contraceptive pills, and scientists from the agency considered it a contraception. But Abortion opponents argued that its use amounted to the termination of pregnancies. They also warned that easy access would lead to promiscuous behavior by teenagers, although no data that supported Claim.
Dr. Wood and others believed that having emergency anticonception without a prescription would mean less unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions.
In August 2005, the FDA commissioner, Lester M. Crawford, announced that the Agency could not make a decision to authorize the freely available use of plan B and it was not expected to reach one soon.
Dr. Wood blamed politics of the foot that the office for the forged and resigned from a job that she had held for five years. In an e -mail to the staff, she wrote that she could no longer stay “when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, was rejected.”
A report later that year due to the Government Accountability Office, the non-party-related arms arm of the congress, found that civil servants of top agencies had been available without a prescription, even before the scientific assessment of Plan B was completed. Civil servants disputed the findings.
Dr. Wood spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006, where she received a standing ovation. They criticized the FDA for ignoring science because “social conservatives have extremely inappropriate influence.”
Susan Franklin Wood was born on November 5, 1958 in Jacksonville, Fla., One of the four children of Dr. Jonathan Wood, a surgeon, and Betty (Dorscheid) Wood, who managed the house.
In 1980 she graduated from the Episcopal School of Jacksonville and Southwestern in Memphis (now Rhodes College) in 1980. After earning a Ph.D. In the biology of Boston University in 1989, she shifted her focus to health policy.
In 1990 she received a fellowship as a science adviser from the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, a dual group. For more than five years on Capitol Hill, she helped push the legislation to increase the representation of women in clinical studies and to expand research into breast cancer, infertility and contraception.
In 1995 she became policy director in the Office on Women’s Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. She joined the FDA in 2000 to lead the women’s health department.
Objections to the approval of Plan B for freely available sales zulden on or it should be available for younger teenagers. The creator of the medicine, Barr Laboratories, suggested limit sale to people aged 16 years.
A senior FDA officer told Dr. Wood that the medicine was on schedule to not win not -prescribed approval for those 17 and older, reminded Dr. Wood in an oral history that she recorded for the agency in 2019.
“I heard that with my own little ears,” she said. “And everyone was waiting for the decision to stop.”
“But,” she added, “the decision never came out.”
On a Friday afternoon Dr. Crawford that an age restriction for freely available sale would be difficult for pharmacies to manage. The problem, he said, needed more studies. In the meantime, no use of non -recipe was not approved for anyone.
Dr. Wood stopped the next Tuesday. She expected her decision to usually go unnoticed. Instead, the news media reported immediately.
“I finally spent the next eight months traveling and talking about this,” she said. “It affected the perception whether you could trust the government at the time.”
Dr. Wood to the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University as a research professor. She became a full professor in 2017 and served director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health there. She and her husband moved to the island of Mull in Scotland in 2017, with a second home in London; She continued to teach remotely until she retired in 2022.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Bettie Wood Payne.
The contretemps on Plan B eventually faded, overshadowed by more controversial episodes of abortion politics. Plan B finally won freely available approval in 2013, although some states allow pharmacists to refuse to release it.
In 2019 Dr. Wood the fear that easy access to a pill in the morning would be a “dangerous, radical, crazy” thing that has been exaggerated. “
“As soon as it is extraordinary, it’s not a problem,” she said. “And yes, that’s what happened: it’s no problem.”
