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Plan B and the moment of conception
I should put my own biases on the table here: Personally, I believe, for involved, more or less consequentialist reasons, that abortion should be legal, free of statutory encumbrances, and easy to get under all circumstances, up to the moment of birth. But I know that this isn't a popular position in America, even among people who generally support reproductive rights; I recognize that it is a difficult issue and I can sympathize with people who have moral qualms about late abortions.
Objections to abortion are sometimes phrased in terms of slippery slopes: if you support abortion under circumstance X then it's not a big stretch to support infanticide under circumstance Y, and where should we draw the line? (Most extravagantly, Philip K. Dick once wrote a misogynistic short story in which abortion had been extended to an option to kill your children up to the point where they learn algebra.)
In practice, though, nobody of consequence is advocating infanticide, and the true political slippery slope in the US slips the other way. Anti-abortion activists are turning their attention to bans and restrictions on various methods of contraception. This is logically perverse even from a hardline anti-abortion point of view, since a likely consequence of restricting contraception is to increase the rate of abortion, but it's happening.
The emergency contraceptive known as Plan B has at long last been approved for over-the-counter dispensation, which is important since time is of the essence when taking it. Unfortunately there are still a lot of restrictions—it can't be given over the counter to minors, andI don't think it's going to be distributed at ordinary pharmacies (mild correction: the FDA says that it will be distributed at pharmacies, but not at stores lacking a pharmacist, so the "pharmacists' rights" dodge to restrict it will probably still be a problem). Reactions to the decision seem to indicate that people still don't understand what it is or how it works, largely because of a concerted campaign to muddy the issue. News articles regularly fail to counter the impression that it's an abortifacient, which it is not.
PZ Myers explained it all in a well-written article months ago, and some more details appear here: Plan B is a larger dose ofprogesterone (correction) a synthetic hormone that mimics the action of progesterone; it is a substance also used in ordinary birth-control pills. A function of progesterone is to prevent ovulation. If a woman takes it within 72 hours of having sex, Plan B has a chance of preventing an egg from being released by her ovaries, and therefore preventing a zygote from being conceived.
An elevated level of progesterone naturally occurs in a pregnant woman, so it's not fatal to embryos or fetuses; Plan B is distinct from the abortifacient drug RU-486 (mifepristone). I also believe that RU-486 should be legal and easy to get, though it should remain a prescription drug because administering it properly requires medical supervision. But RU-486 is not Plan B, and I think part of what anti-Plan B activists are trying to do is sow confusion on this point.
The manufacturer of Plan B states that it may also cause changes in the endometrial lining that prevent implantation. This is the thin reed upon which any logical anti-abortion argument against Plan B hangs: the possibility that Plan B may actually sometimes prevent implantation of an already-fertilized embryo. Though, technically, abortion is defined as the termination of a pregnancy after implantation, the most doctrinaire of anti-abortion activists believe that a human life with full human rights begins the moment a zygote is conceived, and that doing something to prevent implantation is tantamount to murder.
However, as various comments to those posts, and linked resources, explain, there is no good evidence that Plan B really does prevent implantation, and in fact some evidence that it doesn't. For one thing, implantation typically occurs days later than Plan B's time window of effectiveness. The manufacturer's statement is likely an attempt to cover all bases in case Plan B is someday discovered to prevent implantation, and seems to be based on old theoretical arguments about birth-control pills that are not strongly supported by the evidence.
Besides, as I and many others have said before, more than half of all fertilized zygotes either naturally fail to implant or spontaneously abort afterward. If what you care about is preventing zygote death, Plan B ought to reduce the overall level by preventing conceptions even if it causes an occasional implantation failure. Given this, of course, one can get into delicate moral arguments about accidental vs. intentional implantation failure, God's will (if one believes in that) and the doctrine of double effect. But the important thing to understand is that if Plan B does prevent implantation, this is probably rare enough that it should be regarded as an accidental side effect rather than the drug's primary means of operation. Plan B is not an abortifacient, but a contraceptive that works by preventing ovulation.
Some of the remarks I've heard, though, such as the ones quoted in the comments to Bitch Ph.D.'s post, have clued me in to a realization that something else is going on here: I think people are defining "the moment of conception" not as the moment the sperm goes into the egg, but as the moment the man ejaculates, which can be many hours earlier.
When people say that a human life with full human rights exists from the moment of conception onward, what they often mean is not that this new being exists from the moment the sperm enters the egg. What they often mean is that it exists from the moment the sperm enters the woman. It's a prescientific notion of how babies are made that is built into the way we use the verb "to conceive" in its reproductive sense: "Son, you were conceived to the tune of 'Any Way You Want It' by Journey," etc.
It makes some sense if you realize that, prior to modern genetics, it was sometimes believed that some sort of complete homunculus or life-essence existed in the sperm itself, with the woman providing, so to speak, only the soil in which the seed was grown. Even the word "sperm" means "seed", a misleading analogy since it's the pollen that contains a plant's sperm. But the analogy colors the way we talk about sex and reproduction.
I know that just knowing the correct details of where babies come from is not going to dissuade some people. If your real cultural or religious problem is with dissociating sexual intercourse from reproduction, or with giving a woman the ability to veto a man's reproductive power after he comes inside her, no amount of science is going to change your mind. But I do have some hope that a correct understanding of what's going on will keep some undecided people from getting confused.
Objections to abortion are sometimes phrased in terms of slippery slopes: if you support abortion under circumstance X then it's not a big stretch to support infanticide under circumstance Y, and where should we draw the line? (Most extravagantly, Philip K. Dick once wrote a misogynistic short story in which abortion had been extended to an option to kill your children up to the point where they learn algebra.)
In practice, though, nobody of consequence is advocating infanticide, and the true political slippery slope in the US slips the other way. Anti-abortion activists are turning their attention to bans and restrictions on various methods of contraception. This is logically perverse even from a hardline anti-abortion point of view, since a likely consequence of restricting contraception is to increase the rate of abortion, but it's happening.
The emergency contraceptive known as Plan B has at long last been approved for over-the-counter dispensation, which is important since time is of the essence when taking it. Unfortunately there are still a lot of restrictions—it can't be given over the counter to minors, and
PZ Myers explained it all in a well-written article months ago, and some more details appear here: Plan B is a larger dose of
An elevated level of progesterone naturally occurs in a pregnant woman, so it's not fatal to embryos or fetuses; Plan B is distinct from the abortifacient drug RU-486 (mifepristone). I also believe that RU-486 should be legal and easy to get, though it should remain a prescription drug because administering it properly requires medical supervision. But RU-486 is not Plan B, and I think part of what anti-Plan B activists are trying to do is sow confusion on this point.
The manufacturer of Plan B states that it may also cause changes in the endometrial lining that prevent implantation. This is the thin reed upon which any logical anti-abortion argument against Plan B hangs: the possibility that Plan B may actually sometimes prevent implantation of an already-fertilized embryo. Though, technically, abortion is defined as the termination of a pregnancy after implantation, the most doctrinaire of anti-abortion activists believe that a human life with full human rights begins the moment a zygote is conceived, and that doing something to prevent implantation is tantamount to murder.
However, as various comments to those posts, and linked resources, explain, there is no good evidence that Plan B really does prevent implantation, and in fact some evidence that it doesn't. For one thing, implantation typically occurs days later than Plan B's time window of effectiveness. The manufacturer's statement is likely an attempt to cover all bases in case Plan B is someday discovered to prevent implantation, and seems to be based on old theoretical arguments about birth-control pills that are not strongly supported by the evidence.
Besides, as I and many others have said before, more than half of all fertilized zygotes either naturally fail to implant or spontaneously abort afterward. If what you care about is preventing zygote death, Plan B ought to reduce the overall level by preventing conceptions even if it causes an occasional implantation failure. Given this, of course, one can get into delicate moral arguments about accidental vs. intentional implantation failure, God's will (if one believes in that) and the doctrine of double effect. But the important thing to understand is that if Plan B does prevent implantation, this is probably rare enough that it should be regarded as an accidental side effect rather than the drug's primary means of operation. Plan B is not an abortifacient, but a contraceptive that works by preventing ovulation.
Some of the remarks I've heard, though, such as the ones quoted in the comments to Bitch Ph.D.'s post, have clued me in to a realization that something else is going on here: I think people are defining "the moment of conception" not as the moment the sperm goes into the egg, but as the moment the man ejaculates, which can be many hours earlier.
When people say that a human life with full human rights exists from the moment of conception onward, what they often mean is not that this new being exists from the moment the sperm enters the egg. What they often mean is that it exists from the moment the sperm enters the woman. It's a prescientific notion of how babies are made that is built into the way we use the verb "to conceive" in its reproductive sense: "Son, you were conceived to the tune of 'Any Way You Want It' by Journey," etc.
It makes some sense if you realize that, prior to modern genetics, it was sometimes believed that some sort of complete homunculus or life-essence existed in the sperm itself, with the woman providing, so to speak, only the soil in which the seed was grown. Even the word "sperm" means "seed", a misleading analogy since it's the pollen that contains a plant's sperm. But the analogy colors the way we talk about sex and reproduction.
I know that just knowing the correct details of where babies come from is not going to dissuade some people. If your real cultural or religious problem is with dissociating sexual intercourse from reproduction, or with giving a woman the ability to veto a man's reproductive power after he comes inside her, no amount of science is going to change your mind. But I do have some hope that a correct understanding of what's going on will keep some undecided people from getting confused.