Mainstream media and the anti-life movement cried foul when conscientious business owners refused to comply with the Obama administration’s HHS mandate, which requires employers to cover insurance plans that include all forms of contraception, including emergency contraception. Many of these entities have no problem with contraceptives at all, but they object to contraceptives that can also cause the death of pre-born children.
The belief of business owners such as Hobby Lobby’s Green family that mandatory emergency contraception coverage is unconscionable on the grounds that it is also an abortifacient was scoffed at and mocked by liberal pundits who insisted that these objections were deluded. They claimed that the real impetus behind these employers’ objections had to do with archaic and oppressive views of sex, when nothing could be further from the truth. The employers, in reality, are convicted that they cannot participate in life-threatening “healthcare” practices like abortifacients, and they do have their facts straight.
New studies have revealed that all forms of emergency contraception can cause abortion. A report by the Lozier Institute, the education and research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List, summarizes the studies, explaining how each form and brand of emergency contraception can cause an abortifacient by changing the chemistry of a woman’s uterine lining, making it inhospitable to any human embryo that is conceived in her body. These methods include the Paragard T 380, Ella® (ellaOne®), and Plan B. The primary modes of operation of these devices and drugs is to prevent sperm and egg from joining in the first place. But they do in fact interfere with implantation if they fail to, or are not taken/inserted in time to achieve the primary modes of operation.
But members of the medical community, abortion advocates, and mainstream media continue to turn a blind eye to the facts. And the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is responsible for much of the confusion. In what strongly reeks of anti-life bias, ACOG changed the definition of “pregnancy” in 1985 (12 years after abortion was federally legalized in the Untied States). ACOG decided at that time — despite the fact that science dictates otherwise — that the conception of human life no longer took place at fertilization (the joining of male and female gametes, sperm and egg), but upon implantation of that tiny human into the uterine lining. For ACOG, a woman somehow magically becomes pregnant once her baby has implanted in her uterus, and not before.
It is upon this inaccurate and purposely misleading definition of pregnancy that the belief that emergency contraceptives cannot cause abortions rests. But ACOG’s decision to pit definitions against scientific facts backfired when the organization stated in 2012 that because EC is not effective after implantation, it is not an abortifacient. One problem is that several countries recognize the RU-486 abortion drug as an emergency contraceptive, and the function of that drug is precisely to remove an embryo that has already implanted from the uterus. So even if pregnancy didn’t, in reality, begin until implantation, ACOG would still be talking out of both sides of its mouth.
But, as science affirms, ACOG’s definition of pregnancy is incorrect, and a new human life exists from the moment of fertilization, not implantation. One mode of action of all forms of emergency contraception is to make a woman’s body toxic to new life, so that an embryo cannot survive after it has been conceived. With nowhere to go, the embryo is forced out of the woman’s body, and she experiences a miscarriage before she could ever have known she was pregnant. This is what Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, and all the other conscientious employers object to. They don’t object to sex. They object to paying for health insurance plans that would provide women with free drugs that have a proven track record of ending innocent lives in the earliest stages of development.
