The Associated Press (AP) has been running various stories about President Obama having given the green light to 15 year old girls to purchase Plan B over the counter, concluding its pieces with the mainstream consensus that the morning-after pill has “no effect” if a “woman already is pregnant.”
Had AP writers paid more attention to high-school biology and done a little better research on how the pill actually works, according to its makers, they may have written an entirely different story.
The AP story makes its sweeping “no effect” claim by leaning heavily on a highly disputed “medical [re]definition” of what constitutes pregnancy, namely that it “doesn't begin until a fertilized egg implants itself into the wall of the uterus.”
But the main issue is not really about when ‘pregnancy’ begins, but about when a ‘new human being’ comes into existence.
Any Biology 101 high school course teaches that human life begins at the moment when sperm meets egg, what scientists call “conception”. A new human being does not begin at the moment of implantation, but about 7 to 10 days prior to this, in one of the woman’s fallopian tubes.
At the moment the sperm meets the egg a unique and unrepeatable DNA pattern — the building blocks of you and me — is irrevocably established. Every personal characteristic, disposition, talent, and gift that this new human existence will possess begins to unfold in an astounding progression. One Yale scientist recently called the progression from conception to birth so “perfectly organized” that it is “hard not to attribute divinity to it.”
The makers of Plan B do not mind one bit that a medical movement has redefined pregnancy as happening at the moment of implantation. If a pregnancy only begins with the implantation of the embryo on the mother’s uterine wall and not at the moment of conception, then preventing implantation with a chemical cocktail called Plan B could never be construed as an abortion.
In other words, redefining ‘pregnancy’ allows Plan B advocates to avoid the morally difficult situation of having to tell people that the drug ‘ends a pregnancy.’
But the real question that makes Plan B pushers squirm is not whether the drug ends a pregnancy, but whether it destroys a new human being.
Plan B’s makers admit that the drug “may inhibit implantation by altering the endometrium [i.e. the lining of the womb].”
In fact, Dr. James Trussell, Director of Princeton’s Office of Population Research, a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute, and a member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s national medical committee, wrote in an academic review on the drug earlier this year that women should not be denied the truth about how Plan B actually works.
“To make an informed choice, women must know that [emergency contraceptive pills] … prevent pregnancy primarily by delaying or inhibiting ovulation and inhibiting fertilization, but may at times inhibit implantation of a fertilized egg in the endometrium,” he wrote.
Did you catch that?: “…may at times inhibit implantation of a fertilized egg…”. In other words, Dr. Trussell is stating with utmost clarity that Plan B may cause the death of a newly-conceived embryo by stopping it from implanting in the woman’s womb.
Don’t kid yourself if you think a newly conceived embryo in a woman’s body is something other than a unique unrepeatable human being.
As pro-choice James Taranto of The Wall Street recently wrote: “the difference between zygote and an infant—or, for that matter, an adult—is one of degree: All are human beings at different stages of development.”
President Barack Obama’s existence began, not when he became implanted on his mother’s uterine wall, but 7 to 10 days prior to this when 23 chromosomes from his father’s sperm met with 23 chromosomes from his mother’s egg to form the 46 chromosomal organized structure of DNA called a zygote that would eventually move through various stages to become the President of the United States of America.
With all respect, had Obama’s mother taken Plan B, little zygote Barack may never have been able to implant on his mother’s uterine wall. He might have been unceremoniously expelled from his mother’s body, leaving America forever ignorant of a change it could believe in.
But now President Obama wants America’s daughters to have unmitigated access to a deadly drug that may kill new human life and future American citizens. And the Associated Press wasn’t astute enough to get the real story behind the story. It even “discredited” critics of Plan B, saying “many [unnamed] scientists” supposedly saw unnamed studies as contentious that found the drug to be “the equivalent of an abortion pill”.
The only thing that merits to be discredited is not the facts about Plan B’s potential abortifacient function, but the shoddy — dare I say biased — work of the AP journalists.