Earlier today, I posted about how to respond to the pro-abortion argument that states that abortion is OK because babies are parasites and women should not be obligated to carry them for 9 months.
Pharmacies forced to dispense the morning-after pill
I noticed this (left-wing) LA Times article on Hot Air.
Excerpt:
Pharmacists are obliged to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they are personally opposed to the “morning after” contraceptive on religious grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
In a case that could affect policy across the western U.S., a supermarket pharmacy owner in Olympia, Wash., failed in a bid to block 2007 regulations that required all Washington pharmacies to stock and dispense the pills.
Family-owned Ralph’s Thriftway and two pharmacists employed elsewhere sued Washington state officials over the requirement. The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which can prevent implantation of a recently fertilized egg. They said that the new regulations would force them to choose between keeping their jobs and heeding their religious objections to a medication they regard as a form of abortion.
Notice the important distinction made by Ed Morrissey here:
There have been two different issues in the legal fight over Plan B. In one group, pharmacists not working for themselves — for instance, at chain pharmacies — objected to dispensing the pill and wanted job protection despite their refusal. Those cases hardly stand up to scrutiny. The owner of the pharmacy has the right to decide on his own inventory and what to sell, and the employees of that pharmacy either should follow that policy or find a job somewhere else if it offends them. It falls into the same category as a cashier who refuses to handle meat at the checkout counter because he’s a vegetarian.
However, this is something else. The owners of the pharmacy do not want to stock the pills for their own reasons. Even apart from religious grounds, that still seems to be their decision in the marketplace. If they don’t want to sell aspirin, or Ginsu knives, or inflatable life vests for swimming pools, that should be their decision, too. If their customers object to their policies, they will find other pharmacies to patronize. The government has a public interest in telling retailers what they cannot sell for safety reasons (like dynamite, as an example), but should not force business owners to sell something they do not want to sell.
Let’s have the facts: The “morning after” pill kills an unborn human person.
(UPDATE: that link is for RU-486! My mistake, but Plan B can also cause an abortion in some cases by preventing implantation, see the comments below)
And this is another reminder why it was crazy for “Christians” to vote for Obama to steal the money from their rich neighbors. When you vote for left-wing socialists because you covet other people’s money, do not be surprised when the socialist comes after your Christian beliefs soon after. There are a lot of people in church on Sunday morning who need to be reading about economics and capitalism on Sunday night.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Except the morning after pill does not cause abortion. Even that article you linked to admits that.
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Karen, here is the relevant citation:
Hope that helps.
FYI, since this seems to be your first comment, let me just say that pro-life men like me are not taking this position to make you miserable. I am chaste because I believe in marrying if I am in love – and no sex before that formal commitment. My reason for this is because I am pro-life, but also pro-woman.
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Yep. No more facade of “pro-choice.” That is pro-abortion all the way. “You must fund them. You must sell the drugs that causet them. You must perform them to maintain your medical license.”
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As I’ve said before, the Left is intent on eroding our negative rights – the right to do things without government interference – the right that keeps us from slavery.
What freedom does one have if one is required, against one’s morals, religion, professional oath (“First, do no harm,”), and basic common sense, one is required to do something because less than half the country thinks it is a good idea?
How does a court go about enforcing this? Arresting people who refuse to act? Putting the pharmacies out of business (which will be a lot more harmful to women than anything else)? Have a guard stand duty at every pharmacy, waiting to strong-arm unwilling pharmacists into dispensing the medication? Guards armed with guns and Plan B?
(As for the last part; hey, the Left always snipes at us that we have to put women under arrest if we want to ban abortion. Let’s ask them how they intend to implement these things.)
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Emergency Contraceptive pills are not an abortifacient, according to the WHO. They work by preventing ovulation (primary mechanism of action) and by thickening cervical mucus (secondary mechanism of action).
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Ovulation occurs after the egg has been fertilized. A fertilized egg has the completed DNA code of the new new human. It is either male or female, etc.
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Ovulation happens before fertilization. Any decent source on biology can tell you that.
Your claim otherwise seems to indicate something like the following: Once a woman has sex, the man’s sperm swim to the woman’s ovaries, and fertilize the oocytes there. This claim implies two things that are clearly false:
(1) Once a women has gotten pregnant, it would be impossible for her to menstruate ever again. Since menses happens when the uterine lining deteriorates due to a zygote not implanting, if all oocytes were fertilized when ovulation occured, there would always be a zygote available to implant, meaning that menstryation would never happen.
(2) If a woman’s oocytes are fertilized in her ovaries, this would imply that uterine half-siblings are impossible; ie that half-siblings with the same mother but different fathers do not exist.
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You’re right. I mean IMPLANTATION, not OVULATION.
Hey, I read the LA Times article as well as the Plan B website. Plan B is NOT RU-486. But Plan B can cause an abortion after the egg has been fertilized.
The article says: “The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which can prevent implantation of a recently fertilized egg.”
And the Plan B web site agrees that the drug can prevent implantation. Implantation occurs only after the sperm and egg unite and the egg has been fertilized.
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From Rob F’s article:
Emphasis my own. Sorry, Robert, but some Plan B does work by preventing implantation. That the WHO chooses to not acknowledge such except by omission (to those who know what they are looking for) shows that their aims are political, not scientific.
See: here. The argument that Plan B interferes with implantation is that it functions in a way to change the uterine wall lining. The argument against is much more tenuous: it looks as if, maybe, possibly, sort of, the pregnancy rate can be accounted for by estimating the effects of a thicker cervical mucus.
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Actually, the relavent quote is this:
Taken from that very same link. RU 486, the abortion pill, is made up of
mifepristone. The morning after pill contains levonorgestrel (progestin), is pretty much the same thing as what is in a standard packet of birth control, just in higher dosage. This will not cause an abortion.
You should have read through the whole thing before posting it.
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Thanks, Karen, for your comment. I read the page from top to bottom. Then I called my friend who is a pro-life debater on his cell phone! He agreed with me, and the Plan B page.
Plan B doesn’t cause an abortion in every case, but I specifically cited the case where it prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. That causes an abortion.
Here’s the quote from the Plan B web page:
In the third case, there would be an abortion, because the egg has already been fertilized.
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Except something like 50% of fertilized eggs will not implant on their own anyway. Ec is just doing what nature may or may not do anyway.
Do you not believe in birth control, either, because they do almost the exact same thing?
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Thanks again for your comment, Karen.
No, I definitely believe in birth control should be legal! But I might not use it myself.
I realize that sometimes people die of natural causes, and obviously there is nothing I can do about that. But I just don’t think it’s good for us to be deliberately choosing to do certain actions that could result in the death of another living person. And I don’t approve of actions that might result in physical or emotional suffering for others either.
This is why I am chaste. It’s not just that I don’t want to engage in an action that might force me to make a bad decision that hurts a baby. It’s that I don’t want to hurt women emotionally. A while back, I was reading Miriam Grossmann’s book “Unprotected”. I found out about oxytocin, the chemical that is released in the brains of women when they nurse babies or have sexual intercourse, which causes them to form emotional bonds to the baby or to the man.
So at this point I just don’t want to do anything that might hurt babies or women. I think that sex would be OK if a women got a promise from me to be devoted and faithful to her for the rest of her life, because then her feelings of bonding to me would be safe for her to have. For now, though, I just try to focus on writing letters to women I like, and making or bringing them gifts and giving them sympathy, attention, affection and approval as they try do good things. There are all kinds of good things a man can do with a woman without hurting her.
That doesn’t mean I won’t debate and disagree with women, but it just means that I don’t want to hurt them. And I don’t want to hurt babies or pets either. If I told you how much I love my pet cockatiel, you would just die of laughter. You would never believe it.
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Karen, 100% of people will die anyway. Why not allow murder, since we are just speeding up what nature may or may not do anyway?
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It is extremely difficult to conclusively prove either way whether hormonal contraceptives alter the uterine lining or not. The only way I can conceive of finding out would be to give uterus biopsies or hysterectomies to women on HC and compare those samples to the uteruses of similar women who (who had the same procedures) and who aren’t on HC. I think we will all agree that the chances of a study like that happening are nearly zero.
The concern with hormonal contraception (which includes emergency contraception) appears to be that it causes a “hostile uterus” and prevents implantation as a “negative side-effect” of its main mechanisms of action. Lactational amenorrhea works the same way as HC. Hence, if HC is an abortifacient, so is breastfeeding. One cannot draw a line between HC and breastfeeding and hold that breastfeeding is allowable but HC not. If one were to argue that breastfeeding should be allowed because it is “natural”, this is like saying that a zygote has less of a right not to be exposed to a hostile uterus caused by natural hormones than it has not to be exposed to a hostile uterus caused by synthetic hormones.
Even if HC causes zygotes to fail to implant, this does not automatically mean that it should not be used. Uninvolved persons are sometimes run over by police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances heading to calls;that’s a negative side effect of 911 services, but that does not mean we should abolish emergency services..
So long as the number of zygotes that are caused to fail to implant is less than the number of abortions that would have taken place were it not for the EC, the same reasoning applies to EC. How can we discover EC’s primary mechanism of action. Consider the lactational amenorrhea method again. Since women who are doing that do not menstruate, it provides indirect but strong evidence that HC works primarily by preventing ovulation.
Finally, there is nothing inherently immoral in doing something that causes a small number of deaths if it prevents a greater number. If a plane is crashing towards a densely populated area, we would all agree that the pilot should turn the plane to a less densely populated area, even if crashing there would still kill uninvolved people on the ground.
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Lots of bad arguments in there; I’m busy, so I’ll hit the obvious ones and let Wintery Knight (or Neil) pick up the others.
You’re kidding, right? In the age of ultrasounds, chemical tests, microscopic cameras that can go into your intestines, and, oh, I can’t even begin to list them all, you think that the only way to study a uterine wall is a hysterectomy?
ROFL.
First of all, breastfeeding suppresses ovulation; it’s not like a woman ovulates every month, conceives, but the baby just doesn’t implant. Please improve your science.
Even if your science were not utterly dismal, your argument still wouldn’t work. As I’ve always pointed out, there is a difference between dying naturally and being murdered. There’s also a difference (as per here) in dying naturally and dying through neglect.
You fail to understand the most basic of bioethical foundations: we aren’t allowed to deliberately do what nature sometimes does. 100% of people will die. Everyone dies. If we are lucky, we will die naturally at the end of a long life. That some people may die of hunger, for lack of food, does not make it right for other people to starve their dependent children. That children may die of infectious diseases does not justify in exposing them. That the smallest of humans often do not survive does not justify their deliberate (or reckless) killing.
Since when is Plan B a lifesaver?
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Wow, thank you so much for this comment, theobromophile! I really appreciate your help! By the way, I sent you a thank you e-mail, so I hope you got it. I really appreciate your superior knowledge in this area.
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This PubMed abstract says:
“…RESULTS: Ovulation rates were 37% and 97% at 6 and 12 months postpartum; 67% of ovulations occurred in amenorrhea. The luteal phase was shorter, and E2 and P levels were lower in lactating women than in non-nursing women… CONCLUSION: The abnormal endocrine profile of the first luteal phase offers effective protection to women who ovulate during lactational amenorrhea within the first 6 months after delivery. Later luteal phases are improved and women are at risk of pregnancy.”
In other words, LAM causes luteal phase defect, ie a hostile uterus. This hence brings us back to square one. If HC is problematic because it causes a hostile uterus, why is LAM not problematic, even though it causes a hostile uterus as well?
Also, I never said that EC was a lifesaver. The purpose of the paragraph was to show by analogy that undergoing an action with a negative side effect may be justifiable if the effects of the positive consequences outweigh the effects of the negative side effect (cf The Principle of Double Effect). That was my point here, ie that even if EC causes zygotes to fail to implant, this negative side effect is outweighed by the abortions prevented through its contraceptive effect.
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First, a cite for the abstract, please.
Rob – already answered the breast-feeding question above.
That is some seriously messed-up logic. So it’s okay to deliberately kill some unborn people, since if we didn’t kill them at one point, we would kill them later.
WTF?
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Follow the link. For some reason, on this theme or because of my monitor, it is not very visible, so to specify, it’s the phrase “This PubMed abstract”.
Here’s a Fermi problem as an example. It has made up numbers, but it illustrates my point. Consider that there are 400 unintended conceptions that are going to happen. Since EC is not available, all 400 of those take place. Hence, there are now 400 zygotes. Suppose further that half of those do not implant for natural causes that are (ie what Karen was talking about). Hence, there are 200 unwanted pregnancies. Suppose that half of these are aborted. Hence, there are 100 abortions.
Now, consider the same situation as before, but with EC available. There are again 400 potential unintended conceptions. Suppose that due to its prevention of ovulation and thickening of mucus, EC prevents half of those from taking place. Hence, there are 200 zygotes. As before, natural factors cause half of these not to implant. This leaves 100. Suppose further that, due to the effects of EC, 25% of the remaining zygotes also fail to implant. This means that 100 non implantations are due to natural factors, and 25 are due to the EC. This leaves 75 unwanted pregnancies. As before, half are aborted. This results in 37.5 abortions taking place, which we can round up to 38. 38 abortions plus 25 EC-caused non implantations results in 63 total abortions. This number, even when including the non-implantations that would have happened were it not for the EC, is less than the situation without EC. Repeating the same math, but changing the EC-caused non-implantation factor to 50% and 75%, results in 75 and 88 (rounded up from 87.5) total abortions. In each case, this is still a lower number of abortions that without EC.
The key point is this: even when EC-caused non-implantations are included, emergency contraception reduces the number of abortions.
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OK, Rob F, we need to stay on topic. The topic of the post is whether the Plan B pill causes abortions by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg, in some cases. And the secondary topic is whether Christian pharmacists should be forced against their consciences to perform acts of murder because the state decrees that they do so.
Sorry to bring out the gavel, but I need us to stay focused. I apologize if this comes out wrong.
I just think that Theobromophile has already responded to this argument by clearly explaining the difference between death due to natural causes and death due to the deliberate action of a moral agent. We are not concerned with preventing abortions that are no one’s fault. We are talking about morality, which is concerned with the moral obligations of free moral agents.
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Back on topic, as per Wintery Knight: there’s still a moral issue there, Rob. I, for one, would be terrified to live in a society in which the government is the final arbiter of morality, in which citizens were not allowed to determine, for themselves, what is moral and immoral behaviour. As the government is part of every aspect of our lives, it could have almost complete control if we were to not exercise our rights as human beings. “Doing one’s job” is no excuse for immoral behaviour, nor is one’s job a reason for the government to force people to betray their consciences.
Even if Plan B were to reduce abortions – even if every single woman denied Plan B were to get 8th month, partial-birth abortions – pharmacists would still be justified in refusing to be a party to the abortion.
The very fabric of human morality is predicated upon the idea that we are responsible for our own actions, and the wrongdoing of other people does not justify it in ourselves. No physician loses his right to not perform abortions, since a woman denied an abortion will just get one anyway, later on, when the baby is more developed; rather, that doctor may, in good conscience, refuse to be a party to something that is wrong.
The morality of an act is judged by the righteousness of the actor’s action; conscience is not relative. Nor does widespread wrongdoing remove our right to protest it and not participate in it; that a majority (or substantial minority, as with women who abort) will do something horrible does not mean that we lose our right to act in accordance with the dictates of our consciences.
Pharmacists are no more required to be a party to abortion than are expert riflemen required to join the Mafia, because they would provide more human killings and, besides, the Mafia would hire someone else anyway.
Again, even if you disagree, the question really becomes whether or not you want the government determining morality. I can guarantee you that, should we go down that path, there will come a day when the government will require you, as part of your job, to do something that you find to be unusually immoral.
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Thank you, Rob, for the link.
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Wow, I’m sorry to have missed such interesting discussions.
Since most of the talking is done now – and by the way, I’m proud of the pro-life training you’ve gotten WK, let me just throw in a few things to think about which I think will help all the posters here.
First, one of the main issues in contention about EC is when does pregnancy actually begin. Those who support the use of abortifacient birth control (BTW I am a Christian who has no problem with the use of non-abortifacient birth control in marriage) define pregnancy as the moment of implantation not at the moment of fertilization.
Check out this page for reference:
http://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/News/Emergency-birth-control-for-teens.aspx?articleID=13637&categoryID=news-type
There are many others (just visit your local sexual health centre and see how they define pregnancy). Notice too that this ADVOCATE for emergency contraception doesn’t deny that it works before implantation.
This definition allows advocates for abortifacient birth control to say they aren’t really abortions because they prevent implantation.
BTW, this is how they redefined conception as well. Wiki actually has a decent discussion on this controversy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beginning_of_pregnancy_controversy
Of course, if pregnancy is “containing a developing embryo, fetus, or unborn offspring within the body” as Webster’s says, then pregnancy actually begins at fertilization not at implantation.
When we redefine pregnancy like this, we ignore the simple fact that all beings that reproduce sexually begin their lives at fertilization. Therefore, humans begin their life at fertilization not at implantation.
My second point is this: If we do follow the science, then ask yourself would you make the same argument about other human beings that you do about the unborn? For example, if we created a technique that would only kill 85 three-year old Asian kids as opposed to killing 100 three-year old Asian kids, should we make that technique legal?
Wouldn’t we rather work for a day when none of those kids were killed? (Note: this doesn’t mean I endorse the all or nothing approach for abortion in politics – it simply means we shouldn’t be satisfied with any deaths).
The sad reality of this post is that the “pro-choice” side of the abortion debate has imposed its definition of choice, its definition of what is moral and right and is working their way to force everyone else to think and act like them or they won’t be able to do their jobs or live their lives.
That doesn’t sound like “choice” to me.
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