But the 'Morning After' Pill Is an Abortion

FEBRUARY 27, 2004
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

     AN EDITORIAL IN the February 24 New York Times entitled “Science or Politics at the F.D.A.” fretted over the Food and Drug Administration’s recent announcement that it needs another 90 days before deciding whether to approve the morning after pill for distribution without a doctor’s prescription.

Here’s what the editors wrote: “In December, two advisory committees to the Food and Drug Administration voted by a 23-to-4 margin to recommend that the agency allow sales of the ‘morning after’ pill without a doctor’s prescription. That raised hopes that the agency would promptly approve the change, which would remove a medically unnecessary barrier to obtaining a drug that can help prevent unwanted pregnancies and make abortion less common. Unfortunately, the latest rumbling from the F.D.A. is not reassuring.”

The hand wringing continued, “Ordinarily, a three-month delay might not be worrisome. But the change faces significant organized opposition from the religious and the political right….”

Opposition from the religious and political right is warranted.

The morning after pill is not technically birth control in the sense that we understand birth control as a means to prevent conception.

The morning after pill is an abortifacient. It kills a fertilized egg—a little human being—by causing changes to the inside of the uterus making implantation impossible.

A 1994 article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, “The morning-after pill; How long after?” explains: “If an ovum is in the Fallopian tube, the process of fertilization may begin within 15 to 30 minutes after intercourse. The ‘morning after’ is already too late for any contraceptive effect to intervene. Thus some researchers conclude that post-coital drugs act principally to terminate a viable pregnancy by interfering with the endometrium: ... this mode of action could explain the majority of cases where pregnancies are prevented by the morning-after pill.”

There’s really little difference between this method of ending a pregnancy and one terminated by RU-486, the notorious chemical abortifacient approved by the F.D.A in September 2000.

This marked the first time the F.D.A., whose purpose is to ensure the “safety and effectiveness” of our medicines, approved a drug whose sole pharmacological property is the destruction of another human being.

This is a far cry from its mandate and in direct contradiction to the Hippocratic Oath, an ancient code of ethics followed by physicians. The oath stipulates, in part: “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.”

In my other life as a businessman, I run a company that represents Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers. We import and sell generic bulk drugs used to treat or prevent various diseases in humans, companion animals and livestock.

Several years ago we were contacted by a small start-up drug firm in New Jersey with plans to manufacture the morning after pill. They learned that we represented a Chinese manufacturer that produced levonorgestryl, the active drug substance used in its manufacture. The company wanted to test samples and then order larger quantities for trials leading up to a submission to the FDA for approval.

I turned them down. I wrote the CEO a letter and politely told him that my Bible-based convictions about when life begins would not allow me to become an accomplice.

He was furious. He wrote back and warned that our company was going to miss out on huge profits as a result of my religious extremism.

So be it. 

Life is a gift from God. It is precious at all stages of development. God explained to Job that it was “His hand,” that controlled “the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”

But we have ignored this truth and instead embrace the notion that some life is merely an inconvenience and within our control to do with it as we see fit. And an entire industry thrives based on that flawed premise.

Certainly the editors at the New York Times must be aware of the pharmacology of the morning after pill. But they have abdicated their journalistic responsibility as truth-tellers and instead promulgated the lie that somehow, there’s a difference between a life that is snuffed out by a chemical abortion at the microscopic level and one that occurs in a doctor’s office months later.

They along with everyone else who turns a blind eye to the truth is simply wrong. n

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Read all of his columns on his homepage, www.GregRummo.com. E-Mail Rummo at  GregoryJRummo@aol.com