Forget the threat of terrorismthe price of gasor the struggle for families to make the monthly mortgage payments.

No, the issue on the minds of many newspaper editorial writers is whether women can get pills.

At a time when some medical experts are wondering whether our population is, in fact, over-medicated, a number of editorial boards are demanding that the so-called morning-after pill be offered over the counter to women who have regrets about their sexual encounters of the night before.

Even if you dont buy the notion that the morning-after pill can end an innocent human lifeor even if you dont care if it doesyou should at least care about what impact easy access to this post-coital pill could have on womens health.

Any woman who has taken the traditional birth control pill knows that there are possible side effectseverything from the possibility of stroke to weight gain. The idea that its A-OK for women to ingest Plan B without ever expecting to encounter any negative health effects is ludicrous.

Planned Parenthood, the largest purveyor of abortions in America, issued a statement claiming that Plan B holds the potential for improving womens health if the FDA keeps its word this time and permits over-the-counter access.

But the fact of the matter is that the morning-after pill is actually playing Russian Roulette with womens health.

As Concerned Women for Americaa group which has more female support than the radical National Organization for Womenhas stated, The prescription process protects womens health.

At a time when the Food and Drug Administration has been forced to re-examine the safety of the abortion pill RU-486, it seems odd to throw caution to the wind and remove some of the regulatory protections that could prevent women from being hurt by the morning-after pill.

A number of individuals have also pointed out that Plan B promotes promiscuity. Promiscuity leads to sexually-transmitted diseases which pose a serious threat to the health of young women. It is irresponsible for the leaders of the abortion lobby and the news media to promote non-prescription use of a drug that could conceivably cause our STD rates to soar.

And then theres the key question of enforcement. You can say that the drug will only be marketed and sold to those women over age 18, but any clever teenager who knows how to lobby an older sibling or friend to buy cigarettes or booze for her will easily gain access to Plan B. And whats to say that teen girls will not start binging on morning-after pills, once they become as common as KitKats on drug store shelves?

As Concerned Womens Wendy Wright stated, The person who buys the drug is not necessarily the person who will take the drug. What the FDA would have to consider is a foolproof plan to keep proxies from buying the drug and giving it to adolescents.

And lets be clearthose proxies could include sexual predators trying to exploit teenage girls.

And lets be clear on another point: Theres plenty of evidence to suggest that the drive for over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill are part of the abortion lobbys propaganda campaign. The lobby knows that public support for contraception is much higher than public support of abortionhence, its insistence on calling the morning-after pill emergency contraception.

But, one has to wonderIf groups such as Planned Parenthood are in the business of family planning, why would there be millions of emergencies requiring a pill to resolve? What Planned Parenthood is really promoting is irresponsibility, carelessness, and, in the end, surgical abortion.

Because, if a woman still finds herself pregnant after taking the morning-after pill, shell be lured into thinking that the only solution to her problem is to abort her baby the old-fashioned way.

And so the manipulation and exploitation of American women continue.