What the hell does religious belief have to do with anything? Oral contraceptives sometimes work as an abortifacient, affecting the endometrial lining of the uterus so that the one-week-old baby has a much greater risk of starving to death. This thread might help you a bit.
If you are intellectually capable of comprehending it, a big "if", you will realize your error.
sorry . birth control is not abortion, but I respect catholics for their believes. However, other religious believes should be respected too. Once again birth control is not Abortion....The question here is not whether birth control is or is not abortion. That depends a great deal on the type of birth control. A condom, for example, is not. Here we are talking about just one form of birth control – the pill – not about all of them. Please understand that. We are not discussing the condom or any of the myriad other forms of birth control. Just the one form, the pill.
Second, this is not a matter of belief for a Catholic. Whether or not the pill also acts as both a contraceptive and an abortifacient is not an article of the Catholic faith. So far as I know the Vatican has never addressed the issue, nor has my bishop. What is a matter of faith to us is that we consider abortion wrong AND we consider contraception wrong. Please understand though, that we do see the difference between them. One is murder, one is merely resisting God’s will. But whether a particular method is an abortifacient or a contraceptive, this is science, it is not faith to a Catholic.
You, on the other hand, in asking us to respect your beliefs, seem to be indicating that this is a matter of faith to you. I can’t understand why, at all. Whether the pill acts as a contraceptive and an abortifacient is a scientific fact. It can be scientifically studied, and has been. Whether it is right or wrong, given the scientific facts, that is faith.
I could see you saying that contraception is morally OK, because that is a matter of faith. That is a religious belief, and I understand that a large number of modern Christians hold that view. Indeed, the pill usually acts as a contraceptive. You need to understand though, that powerful drugs often do more than one thing in the body. Once a drug is approved by the FDA for one use, it is frequently prescribed by doctors for other uses. This is even more true when the multiple effects the drug has all effect the same part of the body, here the reproductive system. That is because the drug often does more than one thing once in the body, and this is true for the pill. It acts as a contraceptive in many cases. The fact is though, that the contraceptive function of the pill has a failure rate. ANY scientist is forced to admit this, the pill does not always work. When it does not successfully contracept, sometimes the egg will fertilize. And of these cases, some will result in a chemical abortion.
If you will read nothing else in this article, read the summary:
The primary mechanism of oral contraceptives is to inhibit ovulation, but this mechanism is not always operative. When breakthrough ovulation occurs, then secondary mechanisms operate to prevent clinically recognized pregnancy. These secondary mechanisms may occur either before or after fertilization. Postfertilization effects would be problematic for some patients, who may desire information about this possibility. This article evaluates the available evidence for the postfertilization effects of oral contraceptives and concludes that good evidence exists to support the hypothesis that the effectiveness of oral contraceptives depends to some degree on postfertilization effects. However, there are insufficient data to quantitate the relative contribution of postfertilization effects. Despite the lack of quantitative data, the principles of informed consent suggest that patients who may object to any postfertilization loss should be made aware of this information so that they can give fully informed consent for the use of oral contraceptives.
patent +AMDG
Did you pick up that bit of superstition anywhere in particular or is it just a personal mantra that makes you feel better?
I, for one, don't appreciate being patronized by one who clearly believes in unsubstantiated "personal interpretations".
Catholics are strictly scientific in their beliefs ... faith comports perfectly with reason.
This is why the Church's moved to defend life from the moment of conception (as opposed to "quickening") once it was scientifically proven the mother HAS NO MATERIAL EFFECT on and ADDS NOTHING to the complete package of genetic information necessary for the new life to develop. She merely protects and nourishes the child ... as she will for years after he is born.
Doctor Jérôme Lejeune, R.I.P.Q: Once fertilization, once conception has occurred, could you tell the Court, anything added after the point? Does Peter or Margaret come into being, so to speak, through additional information?
A: Well, that was a very interesting discovery of modem science. Because for a long time it has been believed that the mother, the feeling of the mother, could do something to the baby. . . . [but] we know now that everything is written inside the first cell.
I have to come back to this concept of conception, because it is a very remarkable fact that in all the languages coming from Latin, we use the same word either to express an idea which comes into our mind, or to a new being coming into life. We conceive an idea. We conceive a baby. A baby is conceived. Conception applies just as well for defining what will animate matter in a human nature or what will animate your mind within your idea.
And that is, so to speak, an extraordinary description of reality which is at the very beginning the information and the matter, so to speak: the spirit and the body are so intimately interwoven that we use the same word to say spirit animated by your ideas, or life of a new human being animated by genetic property-conception.
Now this moment a new human being is conceived is, really, as for the conception of a new constitution, when the whole thing has been spelled out.
Now we know, and I think there's no disagreement among biologists everywhere in this world, that after fecundation no new information goes in. Everything is there, just at the moment after the entry of the sperm, or it is not enough and it will fail. Either the whole information for the human being is there and the human being can develop and organize, or it is not there and no human being will develop at all.
Now nature has invented an extraordinary device to tell us that nature does protect the privacy of the very first stage of the human being. The right of privacy is written in that way in biology.
The egg is a little sphere of one millimeter and a half in diameter. But it is not naked. It has some plastic bag around it that we call from Latin zona pellucida, because you can see through it. And this very curious plastic bag is, in fact, the perfect control of the privacy of the new being because as soon as the head of the sperm who got there first was able to burrow inside the zona pellucida, as soon as the head comes inside, suddenly in a micro-second, this lucida, this transparent membrane becomes suddenly changed physically, and it becomes entirely impermeable to any other sperm.
It's a mechanism of an extraordinary precision which prevents many sperm from going inside the one egg.