After years of vehement denials from the abortion industry that the morning-after-pill can cause an abortion, a renowned authority on the drug says it can inhibit the implantation of a fertilized egg, thus producing an abortion.
LifeSiteNews is reporting that the statement was made by Dr. James Trussell, Director of Princeton’s Office of Population Research, in an academic review of the drug coauthored with Dr. Elizabeth G. Raymond.
“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 writes.
Trussel is a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute, a member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s national medical committee, and a board member of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, and is a big supporter of its use.
The statement is significant because it will certainly impact the ongoing debate about whether or not the drug causes an abortion.
” . . . (T)he question is also important to Catholics and others who oppose contraception, because it bears on the proper treatment of rape victims,” LifeSite explains.
“While some Catholic theologians argue that contraception is intrinsically evil and therefore never able to be used, others argue that using contraception to prevent a pregnancy following rape is morally acceptable because the aim is to repel the attacker. On this principle, Catholic hospitals in various dioceses in North America have administered the drug, with the support of the bishops, even though some dioceses have forbidden it.”
Wherever the drug is used by Catholics, a test is administered first with the hopes of ensuring that there is no pregnancy.
The debate over the morning-after-pill was recently reignited when Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, Germany issued a statement on January 31 allowing the use of the drug to prevent conception after rape. The same decision was made by the German bishops at their plenary meeting last week.
“The German bishops’ statement affirms that ‘medical-pharmacological methods that cause the death of an embryo still may not be used’,” LifeSite reports.
The bishops claim to have relied on a 2012 study in the journal Contraception that showed the drug was not an abortifacient. However, the study has been called into question because the lead author was discovered to have been an advisor to pharmaceutical companies that produce it.
The possibility that the morning-after-pill can cause an abortion is the single greatest reason why it does not enjoy more widespread use.
While insisting that women be informed of the risk the drug poses to a newly-conceived embryo, Trussell and Raymond go on to make the claim that this does not make the drug an abortifacient because medical authorities define pregnancy as beginning at implantation rather than conception.
As LifeSite correctly points out, biological science does no such thing and has always affirmed that life begins at fertilization.
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