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Foremost Expert on Contraception Says the Pill is Not Working - It's "Outdated"

By Hilary White

LONDON, July 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Pill is outdated and results in unplanned pregnancies; women should get hormonal implants or intra-uterine devices (IUD) instead, says a leading contraception expert in the US. Women do not take the Pill consistently says Professor James Trussell, and it ends up causing more unplanned pregnancies. But rather than encouraging people not to have promiscuous sex or to use Natural Family Planning, what is really needed is a method of contraception that can be forgotten but will still be foolproof, he indicated.

Trussell's statements backed up the observations of those who work in crisis pregnancy centres who say that, despite the government's insistence on more "contraceptive education," a large number of unplanned pregnancies happen while women are on the Pill.

Trussell is the director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and was speaking in London at the conference of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Britain's largest abortion-promoting organisation. He said that in the US, a quarter of all pregnancies are "unwanted" and a result of failed contraception. The Daily Telegraph coverage notes that half of unplanned pregnancies in Britain end in abortion.

The morning after pill, or "emergency contraception," that in some cases causes an early term abortion, is also not the solution, he said. The real problem is that there is too much "unprotected" sex going on.

"It is not reduced unintended pregnancies in America or anywhere else that has introduced it. There is so much unprotected sex you would have to use so much emergency contraception to make a dent," he said.

The answer, he says, is more and better contraceptives.

"The Pill is an outdated method because it does not work well enough. It is very difficult for ordinary women to take a pill every single day. The beauty of the implant or the IUD is that you can forget about them."

An IUD is a device that is inserted by a doctor into the uterus that prevents the implantation of an already formed embryo in the uterine wall, and as such is an abortifacient device by definition, and not contraception. In 2001, Britain's Society for the Protection of Unborn Children forced the BBC to change its news coverage and admit that the IUD is not a form of contraception.

But such distinctions are immaterial to Trussell, whose determined advocacy of contraception is not a surprise given his associations with some of the largest abortion advocacy organisations in the world.

In addition to his position at Princeton, Trussell is a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute, the research branch of Planned Parenthood, is a member of the board of directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, the Society of Family Planning, and the National Medical Committee of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. He serves on the editorial advisory committees of Contraception and Contraceptive Technology Update.

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