Over-the-Counter Abortion. The Associated Press today reports that the makers of a drug that can kill human embryos have applied for permission to market it without prescription.

The government is considering whether to make morning-after birth control available without a prescription, and like most issues that involve sex and pregnancy, it has generated heated debate.

Fierce arguments have gone on inside and outside the Food and Drug Administration, which may decide as soon as this week whether drug stores can sell the emergency contraception known as Plan B without a prescription to women age 16 and older.

Each side accuses the other of manipulating science for political purpose. * * *

The morning-after pill is a higher dose of the contraceptive hormones found in the Pill. It prevents ovulation or fertilization, and can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus.

Because medical experts do not consider a woman to be pregnant until after an egg implants into the uterus, the morning-after pill is not considered abortion, although some conservatives object to any interference with a fertilized egg.

This is not a liberal-conservative issue. It is a reality-fantasy and morality-immmorality issue.
+
As this story makes plain, media are intent on calling the "morning-after pill" a "contraceptive", altho it does NOT prevent conception, which is the combining of a sperm and ovum (egg) to form a "zygote", the first stage of human life. When that single cell, which combines DNA from both parents and is different from both parents, divides, it becomes known as an embryo. An embryo needs nutrition to grow and become an adult. It gets that by attaching to the interior of a woman's uterus, altho human embryos have been kept alive for at least 42 days without being implanted in a uterus. By preventing a zygote or embryo — not a "fertilized egg", which makes it sound as tho we're still talking only about an egg, a nonviable, incomplete human cell from one parent — "Plan B" (or RU 486, or whatever they want to call it) kills that separate human life. That is the real science, not the make-believe, pseudo-science that the makers of this death drug want you to accept.
+
Every single human being now alive was once a zygote or embryo. None of us was once an egg, because the zygote/embryo we were had all our DNA; neither the egg nor the sperm that combined to form us did. Once our unique DNA comes into being, it grows us. That's right, each of us grows him- or herself. The mother is only a temporary host for a separate human life that grows itself whenever there is nutrition, safety, and warmth enuf to survive. That's why a child can be conceived in a little glass dish and implanted in a woman who is not its biological mother. Indeed, one must wonder if human embryos could be implanted in the uterus of other species, closely related (like chimpanzees) or not (cows).
+
Adults are responsible for their acts, and biological adulthood is achieved at puberty, around age 13. Zygotes and embryos are not responsible for their acts. That makes all the difference in the world.
+
Adults have many different ways to prevent conceiving a child. A webpage by JHPIEGO, "a not-for-profit international public health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.", titled "Contraceptive Methods" lists at least 22 different ways that women can prevent conception, NOT including abortion, plus a further method, vasectomy, in which men can keep from conceiving a child. Adults don't need a 24th or 37th or 409th method to prevent conception or to avoid abortion (open or disguised) but still not bring an unwanted child into the world. What they do need is to take responsibility for their acts.
+
If they don't want to conceive a child, women must take all precautions necessary. But if they do conceive a child, they must accept the fully foreseeable consequences of their acts and bring the child to term. If they decide to keep it, they will have heavy responsibilities, but they'll also have enormous rewards. If they decide to give it up for adoption, they will give someone else those responsibilities, and those rewards. They are morally entitled to employ as many true contraceptive methods as they feel necessary and to give a child up for adoption.
+
What they are not entitled to do is screw around irresponsibily and kill a kid they don't want.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:04 PM