Bush says he supports contraception! ... for people he considers "responsible":
This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception.
Could've fooled me! Bush may have been silent on the issue, but his actions have made his stance on contraception clear. And this statement isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the right of all women (and men) to have access to birth control-- there's a lot of wiggle room here. The administration is still likely to oppose certain types of contraception-- like, the emergency kind-- by saying (falsely) that it isn't safe, or that it ends a pregnancy rather than prevents contraception. And what do you want to bet Bush doesn't consider sexually active teens or low-income single mothers "responsible adults"?
Rep. Carolyn Maloney was quick to note Bush's hypocrisy, and sent a letter asking if his policies will now reflect his supposedly pro-contraception position. She enclosed a copy of the op-ed by the woman who had to have an abortion because she was denied EC.
Maloney demanded to know:
1) Will you urge the Department of Justice to incorporate information about emergency contraception in the guidelines for -the treatment of sexual assault survivors?2) Will you remove political barriers to the scientific process at the FDA and urge the agency to make a decision on the application to sell Plan B over-the-counter?
3) Will you intervene on behalf of American women and work to stop pharmacists from preventing access to birth control pills, including emergency contraception?
Excellent questions. Sadly, I think I already know the answers.
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>>by saying (falsely) that it isn't safe, or that it ends a pregnancy rather than prevents contraception
Prior to 1965, conception meant fertilization and not implantation.
In 1965 the American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) ACOG issued a medical bulletin which "officially" changed the definition of conception: "Conception is the implantation of a fertilized ovum." [1]
Prior to this semantic juggling, preventing implantation was indeed recognized as an abortion.
Before this change was published, preventing implantation was an abortion. The day of the word change, preventing implantation was now "contraception". What a difference a definition makes!
If any drug is able to prevent or is capable of preventing implantation, it can rightly be called an abortion drug. This includes Plan B and other brands of emergency contraception which may prevent implantation.
The pro-life and anti-contraception movements are not trying to redefine pregnancy or conception – the abortion rights and contraception movement did this at decades ago. There was no reason for the change other that to allow the distribution of abortion drugs in the form of "contraception."
It is your own movement, Ann, which changed the definition of conception so as to claim the preventing implantation is not an abortion. We are simply trying to restore the meaning of "conception" to the traditional medical and scientific definition.
Ruben Obregon
President
No Room for Contraception
Footnotes
[1] American College of Gynecology Terminlogy Bulliten (September 1965)
[2] Public Health Service Leaflet no. 1066, US Dept of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1963, 27
NFRC:
All that is fascinating history, and all, but you seem to be laboring under the impression that EC (Plan B) prevents implantation.
Let me be loud and clear, since even constant repetition doesn't seem to be getting the word out:
PLAN B DOES NOT PREVENT IMPLANTATION. CURRENT EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION DOES NOT PREVENT IMPLANTATION.
All it does is prevent ovulation, preventing conception no matter how you define it. It's just an extra-strong dose of birth control hormones, rougher on the body, but guaranteeing no ovulation over the next few days.
You are probably being confused by a prior drug called RU-486 which has not been even discussed in a very long time. That drug did, in fact, work by thickening the uterine lining in such a way as to prevent implantation. Its use is not even being considered in the United States.
I'd thank you to avoid "simply" trying to do anything until you understand what it is that you're dealing with.
Frankly, I don't think that attempting to redefine conception back to the 50s is any more valuable than trying to redefine headaches back to the workings of evil spirits (its most notable effect will be to drastically increase the number of technical miscarriages women have, implying that there is some major medical problem where there isn't, as a large percentage of all fertilizations do not implant normally anyway), but none of that is relevant to this discussion.
Funny, I thought science and medicine were about advancement and discovery instead of "traditon". What other "scientific" concepts would we like to reinstate? Copernican spheres? Spontaneous generation? Flat-earth? Relying on 40-year-old documents to back an ideological argument with science is not really in keeping with the only true scientific tradition: progress.
There is no test to establish whether an egg has been fertilized until it implants-- implantation is the first moment at which a pregnancy can be determined.
In any case, hormonal contraception prevents pregnancy prior to fertilization, primarily by inhibiting or preventing ovulation and secondarily by impairing the movement and function of sperm.
I understand that it's your personal view that "life begins" at fertilization, but you are at odds with the vast majority of Americans, who would not consider it abortion until a pregnancy test comes back positive. For that to happen, implantation must have occurred.
Let's not miss the opportunity to drive the wedge here:
Hey Christian Conservatives: you've worked for five decades to put the Republican Party in charge of both houses and all three branches, you've got a Prez that accepts Jesus as him PL&S, and you Still Can't Get Your Agenda Through. Abortion is still legal with only some restriction; schools still can't sponsor Christian prayer, states are turning away from abstinence only education, and now the Prez says he's for the availability of contraception! To kill little fertilized eggies!! So women can have TEH SEX and not get pregnant!!! Ha!!!1!!
In Your F4c3!!1!!eleven!
Whadayagonnadoaboutit, BaptistBoy? Are you gonna let those secular "conservatives" kick you around for six years and then line up like good little sheeple for the midterms?
Ann
>>There is no test to establish whether an egg has been fertilized until it implants-- implantation is the first moment at which a pregnancy can be determined.
What excuse are you going to use if such a test can be devised to detect fertilization? And wouldn't such a test prove your rhetoric wrong -- and deadly?
And what exactly were women in the past at a time when implantation wasn't detectable --"Unpregnant?" This line of reasoning is flawed and not a scientific basis for defining conception or pregnancy.
I notice you also didn’t address the fact that the ACOG lacked a scientific reason to change the definition. The fact that fertilization could not be detected was well known and never and accepted as a reason to change the definition of conception prior to 1965. It was an agenda, not science, which prompted the change. The excuse given for changing the meaning is the same excuse you give – it had nothing to do advances in biology or embryology. It had everything to do with politics, social agendas, and abortion.
Pregnancy is not some relative state of being, ie, if one hasn't taken a pregnancy test then one isn't pregnant until they do so. The knowledge of how to detect pregnancy does not define pregnancy or conception, unless one you have an agenda to distribute abortion
drugs.
>>In any case, hormonal contraception prevents pregnancy prior to fertilization, primarily by inhibiting or preventing ovulation and secondarily by impairing the movement and function of sperm.
You fail to mention they also act by making the lining of the uterus inhospitable to implantation. A drug which act in this manner is not a true contraceptive -- true contraceptives don't prevent implantation.
>>I understand that it's your personal view that "life begins" at fertilization,
My view is not personal -- is based upon the science of Embryology, the correct field of science to determine when life begins. Though there are some who believe otherwise, the general consensus amongst embryologists is that life begins at fertilization, not implantation. Unlike the ACOG, most of these scientists don't have an agenda for which they need to change definitions and blur the language.
>>but you are at odds with the vast majority of Americans, who would not consider it abortion until a pregnancy test comes back positive.
This only shows the success the ACOG has had in changing the meaning of conception and pregnancy. People don't realize the drugs they are taking may cause abortions, thanks to the deception of the abortion rights movement.
And finally, to ZED, the makers of Plan B admit it may prevent implantation. Go argue with them about it, not me. Just Google their website and you'll find the information there.
Ruben Obregon
President
No Room for Contraception
http://www.NoRoomforContraception.com
Thomas: They cant get their agenda through because that's not the reason why people vote GOP. Most vote for economic reasons or terrorism. If it was proportional representation, independents would be in control of the House: in 2004 the GOP got about 49% of the vote for Congress, Dems 48%, and independents 3%. Democrats got 55% of the vote for Senate. The difference comes through gerrymandering, the nature of representation in the Senate, and the seats that were up that year.
The rest of my post was cut off. Bush has a policy of never publicly saying anything that anyone could possibly disagree with, even respectfully (unless its one of his lies). So for example in his speech for an amendment banning gay marriage, he never even mentioned gays. Other politicians will utter glittering generalities from time to time. Bush makes it a point never to utter anything that might NOT be a glittering (or otherwise 'unassailable') generality. Beneath the unassailable facade is a pit bull. For him "Dred Scott was a bad decision" translates into "Roe v Wade should be overturned." Nor will he be caught saying anything controversial on contraception. Bush's actual substance exists, as on foreign policy, in the shadows. You are right to look at his actual actions and policies.
What excuse are you going to use if such a test can be devised to detect fertilization? And wouldn't such a test prove your rhetoric wrong -- and deadly?
What excuse was Einstein going to use if observing solar eclipses conflicted with relativity theory?
Though there are some who believe otherwise, the general consensus amongst embryologists is that life begins at fertilization, not implantation.
Well, if you want to discuss things like probability of implantation, then the embryological definition makes sense. From the point of view of genetics, life begins at fertilization, too. All that is irrelevant to personhood, which is what you're pushing with your "it's deadly" comment and your brushing off of the fact that Plan B prevents fertilization rather than implantation.
NFRC:
This is historically inaccurate, as I understand it. The reason for the change had to do with conception being equated with pregnancy, the fact that it was determined that implantation failure was incredibly common, and should thus be considered a natural effect. It didn't make any scientific sense to define "conception" in such a way that 50% of all of the "conceived" cells washed out of the body naturally after failing to implant. To define it this way breaks the definition of miscarriage, and generates a number of other medical absurdities.Although definitions, which are used as a tool to structure the science above them, are a little more flexible than the science itself, this was a good change, based on a better understanding of physiological processes. If you go back and define "conception" in terms of fertilization, you end up with patently absurd semantic results.
ARGH, NO NO NO! There is NO peer-reviewed clinical evidence that Plan B prevents implantation. Plan B has a Progesterone base that in theory ought to make the uterine lining *more receptive* to implantation, not less.I had to go look up your claim that the Plan B page claims the reverse, and to my annoyance, although it doesn't exactly support it, it gives the possibility more room than it deserves. The Plan B page notes first and foremost,"It prevents pregnancy mainly by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary", and then only in a separate sentence does it very vaguely say that it *may* prevent sperm and egg combination or implantation, but only because people with no scientific background keep speculating wildly in that direction so they can condemn it. There is no evidence of this, and it doesn't make any physiological sense. It is just as accurate, and probably more likely, to say that eating cheese *may* prevent implantation. Shall we take cheese off the market until its effects on implantation are studied? We actually know much less about the effects of cheese on fertility than we know about progesterone.
If you know of some evidence to the contrary, post it. This bizarre myth comes from people not knowing the difference between progesterone and mifepristone, the hormone used in RU-486 which is a progesterone antagonist, or in non-biologist-speak, it destroys progesterone. RU-486 is the anti-Plan-B hormone. That one is the one that breaks down uterine lining. Another way to look at it is that Plan B is the anti-RU-486 hormone, doing exactly the opposite of what RU-486 did.
As to your "general consensus among embryologists", you are again mangling definitions. There is a general consensus among embryologists (as there is among most biologists, as this generally isn't disputed), that there is unique genetic data after the first few replications of a zygote. If you want to call that "life", feel free, except that you've made the term mostly meaningless by doing so, and generated the same classification of absurdities as when you define pregnancy by fertilization. The least of the examples is when you do this, the number one cause of human death by a couple orders of magnitude is natural abortion, caused by God, if you will. As soon as you try to define personhood this way, God (or random chance of biology) is the greatest abortion clinic in history.
But it's patently obvious that there is no evidence for "personhood" at that stage (or if there is, we get other weird problems with cancer cells and anything else that replicates rapidly being in the same category), and I don't know of any embryologists who are quick to try to endorse the existence of personhood at that point, either. If you know of some widespread league of embryologists publicizing that blastocysts and zygotes are sapient, separate human beings with all the rights and responsibilities thereof, please let us know. I'm sure it would be a fascinating read.
Dear Mr. No Room for Contraception,
I have some horrible news for you. One third of the global population is starving to death. Why do you spend your time concerned with mucus and a red dot? Well that's what my miscarriage looked like at five weeks, right before I flushed it down the toilet, yes, I'm sure because I had an ultrasound. Why is your main concern about this mucus inside the body of a woman instead of the human life walking on this planet?
This may sound drastic to some of you but I have often thought the worst case against abortion is the misleading photos. I'm not sure of the statistics but many women miscarry and flush. I wish I had taken a photograph of it because I remember thinking, "Heck! This is what the argument is about?" Women deal with menstruation and bodily fluids being released on a monthly basis. If people like Ruben are so concerned with what goes on between a woman’s legs maybe we should create a website that shows it. Plan B should be available to all women over the counter and we should fight tooth and nail to get it there. The starving people in the world look a bit more desperate than my red dot and mucus. Which by the way was a really good thing because my son was only a year old and we could not afford another child, yet.
Just a thought.
Speaking of Plan B and RU-486, is there any medical reason not to make RU-486 available over the counter?
Alon Levy:
Yes. Without proper medical supervision, you run a chance of serious complications with RU-486, including potentially fatal bacterial infections during the expulsion stage.
Its primary advantage is that it requires significantly less training to administer than a surgical abortion (thus making it easier for doctors to provide the service), but it takes longer, and has a slightly higher risk factor.
Ruben:
No.
I don't care what moronic definition was used, preventing the implanting of a fertilized egg can not be an abortion.
"Abort" means to "stop" or "end", and it refers to the stopping, or ending, of a pregnancy.
A woman is not pregnant until the fertlized egg implants. Period.
Thus, prevention of implantation can't be an abortion. Period.
I'm sorry if there were stupid people a long time ago; it didn't change reality then, and it doesn't affect reality now.
Ok. John and everyone else.
I'm just being the devil's advocate here.
A little "role play", if you will.
If NASA planned a space voyage, and then cancelled that trip before the shuttle ever left the pad...
Could that voyage be properly called an "aborted mission", even if the mission never began?
If so, than an egg that was destined to be fertilized, that was prevented fertilization could technically be called "aborted".
Even if I don't agree with the argument, I think calling it "aborted" is technically correct.
EO, you men are always so concerned about your sperm. Look at Ann's definition of conctraception and Plan B.
In any case, hormonal contraception prevents pregnancy prior to fertilization, primarily by inhibiting or preventing ovulation and secondarily by impairing the movement and function of sperm.
It's like, please don't impair my precious sperm! Give it a rest.
I think pro-life men are mostly concerned with their sperm and unborn male children because it reminds them of themselves. It's like, I have to save my sperm and myself. No devil's advocating today, please, thing are bad enough as they are.
:)
Huh? I'm not prolife, and this has nothing to do with sperm.
All I'm doing is asking for clarification on the term "aborted".
I didn't ask about the term contraception, I didn't ask about the meaning of plan B. I asked about the term "aborted". You didn't even address the question that I asked.
Instead you hurled insults in my direction (misguided ones at that).
You're a male playing the devil's advocate on a thread about abortion and saying that contraception or Plan B are like abortion. It's like when people say "This is going to sound un-PC but" or " I don't mean to sound un-PC but" in a group of women or minorities saying something that irritates most of the people in the group.
I'm just being the devil's advocate here.
A little "role play", if you will.
If NASA planned a space voyage, and then cancelled that trip before the shuttle ever left the pad...
Could that voyage be properly called an "aborted mission", even if the mission never began?
If so, than an egg that was destined to be fertilized, that was prevented fertilization could technically be called "aborted".
Even if I don't agree with the argument, I think calling it "aborted" is technically correct.
Go play somewhere else.
Wrong again.
I'm asking about the meaning of the word "abort".
Just because you misinterpret what I say continuously, doesn't mean your misinterpretation is correct.
nwp:
In the case of NASA, the plan was aborted. The launch was not aborted. The launch did not begin.
Likewise, in the case of an implantation failure (and once again, may I remind you that the number of fertilized eggs that fail to implant naturally is somewhere around 50%), a potentially existing plan to conceive a child via a specific act of intercourse might have been aborted (had it been planned to begin with), but the pregnancy was not aborted. The pregnancy did not begin.
You can define it otherwise, I suppose, but then if you're religious you have to acknowledge that God performs more abortions per year by a few orders of magnitude than every abortion provider combined.
For example...
With the use of Plan B, saying "I aborted a fetus" would be incorrect, because a fetus is an actual thing that would have had to have existed in order to have been aborted.
However, you could say "I aborted the pregnancy" and be grammatically correct. This has nothing to do with the simularity or difference in actions scientifically between "getting an abortion" and "using plan b contraceptions" it is merely centered upon the usage of the verb "to abort". Just like a cancelled space flight is an "aborted mission", it technically could be correct to say that a pregnancy cancelled by plan B contraception is an "aborted pregnancy".
This is a semantical argument about word usage and not a scientific or political argument.
Why it offends you so much that I would ask about proper word usage is beyond me... Since I am pro-Plan B and since I am pro-choice, I would like to be informed as to the correct way to argue these points if the subject ever comes up...
And it seems that saying "Plan B isn't abortion" could technically be an invalid argument...since the counter point (however wrong scientifically, would still be technically correct grammatically) could simply be "a foetus is not aborted, but a pregnancy is".
How is that so difficult for you to comprehend that I would like to know about that aspect of the discussion?
You do know, that when one "plays devils advocate", they propose a non-logical but still supportable argument to learn how others would argue against that argument, don't you? Perhaps you should channel some of your anger and rage in a different way than combatting people that are actually ON THE SAME TEAM!
Zed, I think my confusion comes in becaus according to the dictionary in order to abort something, one needs only to stop something before completion...
It does not give the specification that the action has to be started.
And the transitive of the word "abort" is even more nonspecific than the intransitive that we're discussing.
good god, y'all. The problem is the notion of "destined to be fertilized"...Ain't no such thang, and by following that logic, then every act of contraception, even abstinence could conceivably (hee hee) be considered a form of abortion. In actual scientific terms, 50% of all egg-met-sperm cell combos are "destined to be" sloughed off. Please spare us the "pre-pregnancy" line of reasoning.
Plan B is no more an abortifacient than is the withdrawl method. I seriously cannot believe that contraception is a controversial topic. What century is this??
EO: If you find yourself arguing with someone who is giving a dictionary-definition of "abortion" to back their anti-contraceptive ideology, I would suggest bringing them through to the logical conclusion in that line of reasoning: that any fertile woman who is not pregnant is apparently practicing auto-abortion on a regular basis-- if they cannot see the absurdity in that, then I would cut and run. There are some allies not worth having.
"If NASA planned a space voyage, and then cancelled that trip before the shuttle ever left the pad, could that voyage be properly called an "aborted mission", even if the mission never began?"
Posted by: Eshew Obfuscation
I think the NASA analogy cannot be applied to the abortion "definition" you are trying to clarify. Words have different meanings in different fields. (And in different languages--just try using the google translator and see what you get). Aborting the mission to NASA might mean stopping it on the launch pad when the engines are revved, or when there are no engines on, or even while the astronauts are walking to the shuttle. It's their own lexicon. If you try to translate that to sex and pregnancy, you might as well say that if the husband is having intercourse with his wife, and she changes her mind and doesn't want to get pregnant, and he pulls out of her without ejaculating,..that could be aborting the process of getting pregnant. But of course that is not an "abortion" in the medical sense of the word we use to describe ending a pregnancy. Which, by definition, means destroying an embryo, not a zygote.
If I had to use your analogy at all, I would say that shooting the shuttle down in mid-flight, while it is on it's inevitable course to the moon, could be compared to an actual abortion. If it's on the launch pad, it's contraception.
By the way, this thread was an interesting read, and thank you so much Zed for your detailed and informative post on PlanB...I did not know that about PlanB. I notice that Ruben didn't respond to that post.
Also, Beth I liked your post right after Zed's. A bit of mucus. That's all it was. If they are so concerned about "life" instead of feeling, thinking beings, then they should be on the forefront and beyond the conservationist movement, protecting every bacterium, virus, and cell which developers plow over and dig up on a daily basis to make room for shopping malls.
I've never been able to figure that one out, actually. Human life grows in stages. After the mucus you saw, then comes development similar to the form of reptiles, then lower mammals, then advanced human form. The brain itself is wrapped in these layers of intelligence. If they love all "life" so much then why aren't they protecting wildlife, or joining PETA or something?
And anyway, isn't it clear that looking up the dictionary definition of "to abort" isn't really the way to find out what "an abortion" is? "An abortion" is something much more specific than just the carrying out of the verb "to abort" -- usage is way more important than etymology if you're wanting a basic understanding of what is meant by that word.
And anyway, if you look at dictionary.com, you'll find (among other things) "the medical procedure of inducing expulsion of a human fetus to terminate a pregnancy." That seems pretty direct. If an abortion is meant to *terminate* a pregnancy, which it clearly is (I mean, come on), then a pregnancy must have undebateably begun in order for there to be any abortion.
Then, we have the debate on when a pregnancy begins. Here's how it looks to me, from a scientific standpoint: the moment of fertilization is significant, because that is when the egg begins the process of all those amazing cell divisions that eventually builds a person. However, pregnancy is not just a matter of a cell dividing. There is still another process that must happen before the egg can be thought of as surely on its way -- it has to implant in the uterus. I know we're all given some variation of the "Babies come from egg meeting sperm and having a grand old time" speech when we're little, but the implantation of the egg into the uterus is just a step along the way to pregnancy (which happens to be the last one), just like any other. That's why I (and others) have to wonder if you consider any form of birth control to be "an abortion," since you really have to stretch the "potential" in "potential life" to get it to cover pre-implantation embryos.
And, for the record, having an abortion isn't at all equivalent with killing a child, either -- you can't kill something you don't have, and clearly you don't have a child until you do.
"I know we're all given some variation of the "Babies come from egg meeting sperm and having a grand old time" speech when we're little, but the implantation of the egg into the uterus is just a step along the way to pregnancy."
Posted by: the_becca
Actually we're told more along the lines that the strong, aggressive sperm meets the passive, waiting egg, not the other way around. I think you've got it right. The egg captures the sperm. We're also told that sperm is seed and when they impregnate they plant the seed, (or spill their seed on the ground). It's as if women are just sod or something.
Women carry half of the DNA, and more than that (and to speak to your post which has me thinking along these lines), women have a womb. Women also have strong hormones which flood the uterus and may even help determine the sexual orientation of the baby. We feed it, we grow it. We are supplying most of what the baby needs to be born.
So it's probably to the benefit of the anti-abortion crowd to downplay the significance of all this, and stress the importance of the sperm meeting egg and end of story.
"Actually we're told more along the lines that the strong, aggressive sperm meets the passive, waiting egg, not the other way around. I think you've got it right. The egg captures the sperm."
Hahaha, I completely did not think about the implications of my phrasing it that way as I wrote it. I guess I just accidentally revealed some of my own notions, there.
"We're also told that sperm is seed and when they impregnate they plant the seed, (or spill their seed on the ground). It's as if women are just sod or something."
Actually, that's very literally how it was thought of way back when. I seem to recall reading someone from Ancient Greece (sorry I can't remember who) who put forth that all the "material" for a child was in the sperm, and the female's significance was just as a comfy place for the kid to chill out for 9 months until it was viable on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if that remained the view for a long, long time.
"Actually, that's very literally how it was thought of way back when. I seem to recall reading someone from Ancient Greece (sorry I can't remember who) who put forth that all the "material" for a child was in the sperm, and the female's significance was just as a comfy place for the kid to chill out for 9 months until it was viable on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if that remained the view for a long, long time."
But don't forget that it was also the woman's fault when anything went wrong with the pregnancy or if *gasp* the baby was a girl!
I hope you mean "prevents conception" and not "prevents contraception"!
However, in spite of the comment by Mr. Ruben "I'll never be pregnant" Obregon, Plan B does not prevent implantation: it prevents ovulation.
Although, since we do not generally condone the use of people's bodies without their permission, that little quibble is immaterial.
And hey, isn't even menstruation the same thing as an abortion, since we're all "pre-pregnant" anyway?
/snark