WASHINGTON — President Obama, noting that he was the father of two daughters, threw his wholehearted support on Thursday behind a decision by his health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, not to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter to young teenagers.
“The reason Kathleen made this decision is that she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going to a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could have an adverse effect,” Mr. Obama said to reporters at the White House.
“And I think most parents would probably feel the same way,” the president added.
Mr. Obama insisted that he was not involved in the decision, on a contraceptive pill known as Plan B One-Step. The decision by Ms. Sebelius, announced on Wednesday, was an extremely rare case of an administration official’s publicly overruling the Food and Drug Administration, which had concluded after extensive research that the medication was safe to be sold to teenagers 16 and younger without a prescription.
The bluntly personal nature of the president’s response suggested that the White House is well aware of the political sensitivities, going into an election year, of allowing broader distribution of the contraceptive, whatever the Food and Drug Administration’s scientific arguments in favor of it.
Mr. Obama’s comments came in a combative appearance that followed the Senate’s rejection of his nominee to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray. The decision, the president said, “makes absolutely no sense,” leaving millions of Americans without adequate protection in their dealings with financial institutions, including payday lenders and debt collectors.
But Mr. Obama also used the occasion to address a range of issues, rejecting charges by Republican presidential candidates that he practices a foreign policy of appeasement, particularly in the Middle East.
“Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of top 30 Al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement — or whoever’s left out there, ask them about that,” the president said.
Later, Mr. Obama argued that his administration had “systematically imposed the toughest sanctions ever in Iran.” He said the pressure campaign had left Iran isolated and unified world opinion against its leaders.
He also delivered some of his most urgent language yet on the European debt crisis.
As European leaders struggle to fashion a response to the deepening debt crisis, Mr. Obama suggested that time was running short, saying, “I am obviously very concerned about what’s happening in Europe.”
“I think they now recognize the urgency of doing something serious and bold,” the president said of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other leaders. “The question is whether they can muster the political will to get it done.”
“Europe is wealthy enough that there’s no reason they can’t solve this problem,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s not as if we’re talking about some impoverished country that doesn’t have any resources and is, you know, being buffeted by the world markets and they need, you know, to come hat in hand to get help.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama spoke with Mrs. Merkel by phone. He said she had made some progress in pushing other European nations toward a “fiscal compact” that would prevent a repeat of the fiscal profligacy that had gotten Greece and other countries into trouble, and set off the broader crisis of confidence. But Europe’s first priority, Mr. Obama said, was to settle financial markets.
“We’re going to do everything we can to push them in a good direction on this,” he said, “because it has a huge impact on what happens here in the United States.”
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