WASHINGTON — A longtime women's health advocate quit her high-level Food and Drug Administration (FDA) post yesterday to protest the agency's refusal to allow over-the-counter sales of the "morning-after" pill to women over 16.

In an e-mail to friends and colleagues, Susan Wood, 46, the FDA's assistant commissioner for women's health, said she was resigning because limiting access "to a product that would reduce unintended pregnancies and reduce abortions is contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women's health."

After two years of deliberation and delays, FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford had announced Friday that even though the drug is safe, proposed restrictions on teenage girls' access to it have raised legal issues that must be examined in a process that could take months, or longer. The FDA had earlier promised a decision by Sept. 1.

Crawford's decision was greeted with a nationwide rush of editorials accusing the Bush administration of caving in to political pressure from conservatives.

"[The Plan B decision] is a double standard based on age for over-the-counter sales," Wood said yesterday. "If this was a real issue, it should have been set up for a proceeding a year and half ago.

"The idea that we have to go through rule making IS a decision — It's denying by way of delay," she said. "It's not just denying it [Plan B] to teens now, but to all women."

A conservative group applauded her resignation. "Thank goodness there is now one less political activist at the FDA who puts radical feminist ideology above women's health," said Wendy Wright, policy director for Concerned Women for America.

But Wood's resignation also brought calls from prominent Democratic lawmakers for hearings into the agency's handling of the issue.

In a joint statement, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., said that "the FDA and the American people have lost a strong voice for scientific integrity in Dr. Wood."

Wood, a biologist, has been in government since 1990. She worked as a congressional adviser on women's issues, then at the Department of Health and Human Services. She joined the FDA five years ago.

Plan B, a concentrated birth-control hormone, reduces the chance of pregnancy by about 80 percent if taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse. Research shows women often have trouble getting a prescription or finding a pharmacy that stocks it.

Opponents of Plan B contend it will spur promiscuity, and amounts to abortion because it may prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.

Information from Seattle Times reporter Alicia Mundy was included in this report.