Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions

When patients hear someone suggest the Pill causes abortions, they will often come to their
physician, who may be prolife, and ask if this is true. The physician may sincerely say, “According to
my understanding, the Pill just prevents conception, it doesn’t cause abortions. You have nothing to
be concerned about.”
Most physicians assume that if the Pill really caused abortions, they would surely know it. In most
cases they are not deliberately misleading their patients. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that their
patients do end up misled. Based on their physician’s reassurances, they don’t look into the matter
further—nor would most know where to look even if they wanted to. In reality, the dedicated
physician is extremely busy and confident that the Pill only prevents conception; typically he too does
not take the time to do the necessary research.
An isolated reference here or there simply isn’t sufficient to change or even challenge the deeply
ingrained pro-Pill consensus of medicine, society or the church. If Time magazine devoted a cover
story to the subject, the information would reach a popular level in a way it never has before. But
Time and most of its readers would have little interest in the subject. Perhaps eventually a major
Christian magazine will present this research to the people who should care the most. So far this has
not happened.
Medical semantics have also played a critical role in obscuring the Pill’s abortive mechanism. As
documented earlier in this book, in 1976 the word “contraceptive” was redefined by the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), to include agents that prevent implantation.
Changes in terminology typically occur to draw more careful scientific distinctions, whereas this one
served only to blur the distinction between two clearly separate things, fertilization and implantation.
Several prolife Ob/GYNs told me they are convinced this move, happening three years after the
Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion, was a deliberate attempt to obscure concerns about
birth control chemicals that sometimes cause early abortions.
Because of the semantic change, medical professionals can honestly say that the Pill is only a
contraceptive, even if they know it sometimes acts to prevent implantation. For example, Dr. Linda J.
Martin wrote to Pediatric News pointing out that while an August 1997 article had claimed the
emergency contraception pill could “prevent up to 800,000 abortions a year,” exactly the opposite
was the case—“they would in fact cause 800,000 abortions a year.” Her logic was that life begins at
conception, not implantation. The physician who wrote the article, Dr. James Trussel, responded,
“Both the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
define pregnancy as beginning with implantation. Therefore, emergency contraceptive pills are not
abortifacient.” 112
This is a dramatic but increasingly common example of semantic depersonalization—using an
arbitrary redefinition to relegate a child to nonexistence. What might properly be called a
“contraimplantive” mechanism is called instead a “contraceptive” mechanism. An article on ‘morning
after’ pills explains that they are “ordinary birth control pills containing the hormones estrogen and
progestin, but are taken in a higher dose up to 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.” 113 The article
explains that the pills prevent implantation, but the large font pull quote from Dr. Jack Leversee of
the University of Washington School of Medicine assures readers, “We are not doing away with a
pregnancy; we are preventing it from ever becoming a pregnancy.”
Undiscerning prolifers may read such statements and be reassured that these pills don’t cause
abortions. Attaching new meanings to old words such as conception and pregnancy has succeeded in
making it sound like the Pill and other hormonal contraceptives don’t kill human beings. It has done
nothing, however, to change the fact that sometimes that’s exactly what they do.
Even when the information about the Pill rises to the surface here and there, so many Christians—
including pastors and parachurch leaders—have used and recommended the Pill, that we have a
natural resistance to raising this issue or looking into it seriously when others raise it. (I know this
from my own experience.) This is likely why so few individuals or organizations have researched or