Dear Colleague:
The turmoil in the health care field over the distribution of the
morning-after-pill continues to grow.  The argument is about fundamentals,
namely, when does human life begin?

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
13 August 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 27

Life Begins at Conception-But Not All Agree 

Last week we reported on the case of the 11 Alabama nurses who resigned
from the Alabama Department of Public Health and 50 health care workers
who requested reassignment to avoid having to distribute the Plan-B
morning-after-pill.  They objected to being involved with chemical
abortions.

What's the fuss, responded the man in charge of family planning for the
health department.  According to Dr. Tom Miller, emergency contraceptives
do not cause a woman to abort a growing fetus, like the RU-486 pill does.
Instead, he says, it prevents a "fertilized egg" from attaching to the
lining of the uterus.

But just what is a "fertilized egg"-actually a developing embryo, to use
proper scientific terminology-if not human life? And if a drug that
renders a mother's body inhospitable to life stops its development, is
this not an abortion?
 
People who are not ideologues for causes like population control, abortion
"rights" and so-called "family planning", know in their gut that there is
something wrong-unnatural-about pills, drugs and potions that interrupt
the normal course of things, especially things as delicate and beautiful
as human reproduction.  There is a reason these things are forbidden by
the Hippocratic oath that all physicians, at least until recently, have
taken when they receive their medical degrees.  And that is why these
brave Alabama nurses were instinctively repulsed by the idea of
distributing the morning-after-pill.

Not that the revolt of the nurses gives Dr. Miller pause.  Rather he falls
back on the standard liberal jibe that they are trying to impose their
personal religious views on others.  "It's not appropriate for me or any
other group to dictate public health policy based on personal beliefs",[1]
he says.  Yet this is precisely what he is doing in his absurd and
idiosyncratic claim that human life begins not at conception but at
implantation.

To bolster the view that Dr. Miller represents scientific wisdom and the
nurses' religious obscurantism, The Montgomery Advertiser quotes a Nurse
Tyner as saying that "The medical definition is that you are not pregnant
until the egg implants. The Christian definition is that you are pregnant
after conception" and says she is wrong.

But Tyner is only wrong in suggesting that her position is a sectarian
one.  It is not merely the Christian definition that life begins at
conception; it is the scientific and medical definition as well.

This theory is about as much in doubt as that the earth goes round the
sun.

Yet the U.N.-controlled World Health Organization, ever ready to do the
bidding of the family planners, has obligingly redefined pregnancy to
begin at implantation.  It seems that there is a lot of money to be made
by selling the morning-after-pill, and inconvenient truths must be got out
of the way.  The war on people must go on.

Endnotes
[1] Montgomery Advertiser editorial of July 7, 2004.

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