Emergency Contraception?

by J.C. Willke MD

You've heard that the FDA, the federal Food & Drug Administration, has approved what it calls an “emergency contraception kit”. It has stated that women can use these pills up to three days after unprotected sex and that this will prevent pregnancy in almost every case.

This is not true! To understand why, let's look at what actually happens. After sperm are deposited inside of a woman, they rapidly swim through the uterus, through the tubes, and out to the ovary. This passage takes as little as thirty minutes. If she has ovulated, if an egg awaits, fertilization then occurs immediately. One sperm then enters the ovum and proceeds to unite its 23 chromosomes with the 23 female chromosomes in the nucleus of the ovum. From sperm entrance until the first cell division takes place is about one day. From then on, rapid cell division occurs.

For the first week of life, this new human embryo floats freely down his or her mother's tube, journeying to the womb. When one week old, he or she plants in the nutrient lining of the womb.

If fertilization has occurred, and if the woman takes the “morning-after” pill within a few hours or days after the “event”, the hormones in the pill harden the lining of the womb. Then, when this tiny human embryo reaches the womb, he or she cannot implant and dies. The effect of the pill, then, is to kill this tiny human at one week of life. The effect is a very early abortion.

Pro-abortion forces have labored mightily to claim that “pregnancy” does not begin until the embryo has attached to the uterus. It may well be that the mother's body is not directly affected until that time, but this human embryo is already one week old when this occurs. Reading and listening to the news accounts, you've heard the term “pregnancy” used interchangeably with “human life”. They are not the same.

It has long since been scientifically proven that human life begins at that first-cell stage. And whether you call her “pregnant” at conception, or at implantation one week later, is a mere matter of semantics. The fact of the matter is, a human life exists at the beginning and dies at one week from the effect of this pill. In fact, then, this pill is not emergency contraception – rather, it is emergency abortion.

Reporting has claimed, correctly, that if the embryo has already attached, the pill apparently does no harm. It is true that the pill, then, would not cause an abortion, but it is not proven that it's harmless. Let's not forget the tragic harvest of genital deformity in girls and boys born to mothers who were given an artificial estrogen compound, DES, back in the 1950s, while pregnant. In any case, since the baby is one week old when he or she plants, that's several days after she's taken the pills.

Spokeswomen for the National Right to Life Committee, among others, have made another claim, and that is that this pill stops ovulation and therefore is a contraceptive. This may be possible in a few occasions. It would work this way: A woman has sex on Saturday night and takes the pills Sunday morning. She has sperm inside of her. Her body was programmed to ovulate Monday night. Without the pills, she could have conceived Monday night, because sperm can live and be active enough to fertilize for 72 hours or more after entering her body.

If she took the pills Sunday morning, it is theorized that this might block her Monday night ovulation. If that were true, then this would be a contraceptive effect. One problem here is that this mechanism has not been proven – it's only a theory. The major problem, however, is that it would occur in only a very small percentage of cases, and that in the overwhelming majority of times, she would have become pregnant within the hour after she had sex, and the pills would cause an abortion.

The reports have also mentioned this – and they've been correct in separating the effect of these pills from the effect of the French abortion pill, RU 486. The RU 486 pill is taken three weeks or more after conception and two weeks or more after implantation. Its effect is to kill a developing baby after his or her heart has begun to beat. It's clearly an abortion drug and operates quite differently from a “morning after” pill.

So, let's recap. After sex, sperm swim out to the ovary in as little as thirty minutes. If she has ovulated, conception occurs immediately. If she takes these pills after the act, they cannot prevent pregnancy, for she has already conceived. What they can do is prevent implantation at one week of life – and that's an abortion.