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MADRID, December 19, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Use of the abortifacient morning-after pill in Spain has risen by 83% in 2010, the first full year of over-the-counter availability of the dangerous drug, according to a report by ANSAmed news service.

The Spanish Ministry for Health approved the sale of the morning-after pill without a doctor’s prescription, and with no age restriction, in September 2009, citing a need for “emergency contraception” and to reduce “unwanted pregnancies.”

“It is an emergency method of contraception, not to be used except in emergencies,” said Health Minister Trinidad Jimenez in a press release at the time. “We don’t want it to become another means of contraception.”

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However, mounting evidence has shown that the drug is both ineffective for its stated purpose of reducing unintended pregnancies, and is being abused the world over as a common method of contraception.

In a study released in May this year by Planned Parenthood’s former research arm, the Guttmacher Institute, head researcher Megan L. Kavanaugh said that although use of the morning-after pill in the U.S. has doubled since the Food and Drug Administration authorized over-the-counter sales, the easy availability has not resulted in a reduction in “unintended pregnancies.”

“So far there’s no evidence that this is happening,” admitted Kavanaugh according to a Reuters report.

Another contraception and abortion pushing organization, RH Reality Check, admitted in a blog posting in 2009 that emergency contraception (EC), or the morning-after pill, “is not as effective in reducing unwanted pregnancy rates at a population level as we once hoped.”

The authors of the report, which originally appeared in the journal Contraception, also admit that the promised effectiveness of EC was greatly exaggerated in a bid to gain lucrative financial support for the method in anticipation of huge profits for pharmaceutical companies.

“Our expectations for EC’s effectiveness were biased upwards by an early estimate that expanding access to emergency contraception could dramatically reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancy and subsequent abortion … We realize that this was an overly optimistic calculation,” authors Elizabeth Westley, Francine Coeytaux and Elisa Wells said.

Earlier this year LifeSiteNews reported that a study on the impact of the UK government’s scheme to hand out totally free emergency contraception to teenagers as young as sixteen found that the plan not only did not reduce teen pregnancy rates, but has led to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases.

The study of the government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, titled “The Impact of Emergency Birth Control on Teen Pregnancy and STIs,” compared areas of England where the morning-after pill was available to teens free of charge at pharmacies, with areas where the plan had not yet been introduced.

The researchers found that pregnancy rates for girls under 16 remained the same in both areas, while the rates of sexually transmitted diseases increased by 12 percent in those areas where the pill was made freely available.

In India the government has cracked down on ads that portray the dangerous medication as safe and effective “pregnancy prevention” targeted at teenagers and young unmarried women. The country has seen a year-by-year increase of 250 percent in sales of morning-after pills, leading government officials to raise concerns that women who use this drug, either occasionally or excessively, are putting themselves at risk of higher rates of serious health issues such as breast, ovarian and uterine cancer, as well as ectopic pregnancy.

“Concerns were being raised that women were popping the pills as a means to be free of tension after unprotected sex,” the head of India’s drug control department, Surinder Singh, was quoted to say by the Times of India.

“Women also weren’t being told that the pill should be taken as an emergency measure, not a routine one,” Singh said.