Posted on 01/07/2007 10:58:22 AM PST by wagglebee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A new study reported in a prestigious medical journal confirms that the morning after pill does not reduce either abortion or pregnancy rates. The survey, published this month in the Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, covers the use of the Plan B drug in 10 countries.
Authors Elizabeth Raymond and James Trussell, advocates of the morning after pill, conducted a meta-analysis of studies conducted in 10 countries.
They conclude that “increased access to emergency contraception pills enhance use but has not been shown to reduce unintended pregnancy rates."
The authors note that “no study has shown that increased access to this method reduces unintended pregnancy or abortion rates on a population level” and that “the consistency of their primary findings is hard to ignore."
They say the morning-after pill “is unlikely to produce a major reduction in unintended pregnancy rates no matter how often women use it” and that “previous expectations that improved access could produce a direct, substantial impact on a population level may have been overly optimistic.”
They also state the drug's effectiveness may be "substantially ... overstated."
Wendy Wright, the president of Concerned Women for America, reacted to the study in comments LifeNews.com obtained.
"The same researchers who demanded the morning-after pill become non-prescription now admit that making the drug easy to get does not live up to their promises of reducing pregnancies and abortions," Wright said.
Wright said that "intense pressure" from them and abortion advocates forced the FDA to make the Plan B drug available over the counter to anyone over the age of 18.
She said that decision "[denied] women the medical counseling and testing that they need before taking this drug."
In questioning the morning after pill's effectiveness, the authors said "the published efficacy figures calculated from currently available data on this regimen ... may overstate actual efficacy, possibly quite substantially."
"Clearly, if the method is only weakly efficacious, it is unlikely to produce a major reduction in unintended pregnancy rates no matter how often women use it," they added.
The morning after pill article is titled “Population Effect of Increased Access to Emergency Contraceptive Pills: A Systematic Review” and appears in the January edition of the Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
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Wishful thinking; wait until the reports come in on anti-global warming strategies in about 50 years.
Surprised? The whole movement was based on lies and eugenics... par for the course. I guess now when the children are born disabled after it doesn't work, they'll be 'mercifully' taken away from their future painful, non-productive lives. s/
What will gay activisits do when (which I do not think will happen as it is not genetic) we are able to prenatally diagnose gayness and people start aborting gay children. Oh the hugh cry aganist abortion we will hear from the hypocrits!!!!!!!!! Not going to happen though. I saw a lady from The Nation who has written a book blasting the Religious Right about Plan B. She lied. She called it just birth control (which It can be but it also can work like as IUD). She claimed pregnanacy did not start until implantation. That may be a medical term( But I as a physician have never heard it) but she failed to say life begns at conception. That is a scientific fact. Deceit she was selling.
Growing up in a fairly conservative area in the 1980's I was taught that pregnancy started at implantation; there certainly didn't seem to be any controversy about the subject. Defining a woman as "pregnant" as soon as an egg is fertilized somewhere within her body would imply that many women can never really know if they've ever been "pregant"; to me that seems rather absurd.
Further, if an egg is fertilized in vitro and then placed in another woman's uterus, at what point does that woman become "pregant"? Does she become "pregnant" when the embryo crosses the imaginary plane connecting the furthest projections of the cervix? Or maybe she's "pregant" as soon as the embryo is within ten feet of her. Is really there any meaningful defining moment other than implantation?
I agree that may be the definition of being Pregnant. But that is not the question she was trying to smooth over. The question is when does life begin and scientifically it is at conception. No scientist can deny that a fertalized egg is a living organism. It just is. The argument gets purposely deceitful by terminology- mixing legal with scientific with common terminology and political spinning.
Is an acorn a living organism?
What types of metabolism does an unimplanted embryo engage in? From my understanding, the really interesting stuff doesn't start happening until implantation.
Yeah, because it really ends the pregnanacy, no one's going to bother not getting pregnant. By the time you use it, you're probably pregnant already. I wonder what it's effect on the birthrate of unplanned pregnanacy is.
BTW, I should mention that I think that in many ways the best arguments to use against the morning-after pill and embryonic stem-cell research have to do with the absolute ineffectiveness at those things toward achieving the claimed objectives. If they actually worked toward their claimed objectives, then it would be necessary to argue whether the benefits outweigh the costs. But when the benefits are non-existent, cost-benefit analysis is meaningless.
I'm pretty certain that the article means it's unlikely to produce a major reduction in the number of detectable unwanted pregnancies. And if it can't even accomplish that, what's the point?
I wish liberals could somehow be made to acknowledge that people are much more likely to engage in reckless behavior if they think it safe than if they think it dangerous; efforts to make reckless danger 'safer' will result in more people engaging in it. A ledge with a railing that is likely to fail if leaned upon may be far more dangerous than a ledge with no railing at all.
But the current weasel-word is "conception." Prior to the Roe vs Wade debacle, conception was defined as fertilization. Since then, there has been a confusing but deliberate trend to define conception as implantation. In this way, drugs and devices which kill the child in its youngest stages can be deceptively called "contraceptives."
By my understanding of biology, there are significant qualitative differences between an unimplanted embryo and an implanted one, roughly analagous to the differences between an acorn and a germinated sapling.
For example, a characteristic of all vertibrates is a metabolism based upon exchanging oxygen and CO2 with the environment. From what I understand, embryos start exchanging CO2 for oxygen almost immediately upon implantation, but I'm unaware of any means by which they could do so before.
What sort of metabolism do embryos have prior to implantation?
The zygote (fertilized egg) undergoes cleavage again and again. After the 8-cell stage, mammalian embryo cells bind tightly to each other, forming a compact sphere of 16 cells. Then the outer layer of cells - the trophoblast - secretes water into this sphere; then, when the number of cells reaches 40 to 150, a central, fluid-filled cavity forms.
All this greowth and development involves nutrition, respiration, specialization, etc. and it allhappens before implantation.
I personally think the "interesting stuff" starts about 30 minutes before ejaculation.
I hadn't realized the fallopian tubes were an oxygen-rich environment. Indeed, I would have expected them to be somewhat the opposite.
Other than water, what does an embryo absorb from its environment as it travels through the fallopian tubes, and what does it excrete?
I guess that's what I was getting at. If people think they can just eliminate the complication of a baby with that kind of ease, they're not going to do anything to avoid getting pregnant.
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