Save the Tonsils!
The Difference Between Babies and Gall Bladders
These are both posted by Headmistress, Zoo Keeper at the Common Room, and I love reading her well-thought posts. She has a lot to say on a huge variety of topics.
Rolling with the Controversy - this one's just a snippet, but it's got a couple of very promising looking links, including this:
Does the Pill Cause Abortions, which is a condensations of an 88-page pamphlet on that topic. And the conclusion that the author comes to is that yes, indeed it does. He has some pretty compelling sources: the drug information that the companies themselves publish about their research that the FDA requires. Not so much on the short form that they put in the bag at the pharmacists (wouldn't want the consumers to notice), but in the long form the pharmacists and physicians have it's there. And in the Physician's Desk Reference. Here's just a bit from this article:
If you want more information about birth control pills, ask your doctor, clinic or pharmacist. They have a more technical leaflet called the Professional Labeling, which you may wish to read. The Professional Labeling is also published in a book entitled Physician's Desk Reference, available in many bookstores and public libraries.
Of the half dozen birth control pill package inserts I've read, only one included the information about the Pill's abortive mechanism. This was a package insert dated July 12, 1994, found in the oral contraceptive Demulen, manufactured by Searle. Yet this abortive mechanism was referred to in all cases in the FDA-required manufacturer's Professional Labeling, as documented in The Physician's Desk Reference.
In summary, according to multiple references throughout The Physician's Desk Reference, which articulate the research findings of all the birth control pill manufacturers, there are not one but three mechanisms of birth control pills:
1. inhibiting ovulation (the primary mechanism),
2. thickening the cervical mucus, thereby making it more difficult for sperm to travel to the egg, and
3. thinning and shriveling the lining of the uterus to the point that it is unable or less able to facilitate the implantation of the newly fertilized egg.
The first two mechanisms are contraceptive. The third is abortive.
When a woman taking the Pill discovers she is pregnant (according to The Physician's Desk Reference's efficacy rate tables, this is 3 percent of pill-takers each year), it means that all three of these mechanisms have failed. The third mechanism sometimes fails in its role as backup, just as the first and second mechanisms sometimes fail. Each and every time the third mechanism succeeds, however, it causes an abortion.
I've had various doctors offer me birth control pills at a couple different times. Mostly to "regulate my cycle" (which it doesn't do, in my opinion. It just makes it look normal.). But pills were an option that I briefly looked at when I first got married. I had a bad feeling about it and didn't go there. I'm not sorry. But WHY didn't my doctors ever once mention this stuff?? This is important stuff to know! How am I supposed to make informed decisions if the professionals that I trust to inform me are holding out on me?
4 comments:
My family practice physician told me long ago that birth control pills' back-up mechanism is that it can serve as an abortifcant. That immediately made it a wrong choice for me (just like IUDs are a wrong choice for me). He told me that *all* hormonal forms of birth control serve to thin the lining of the uterus as at least one of their back-ups. Yet, I've had a pharmacist stand there and tell me "No, your doctor is mistaken about your birth control pills." When I produced documentation from the PDR, she started stumbling all over herself. Um...no, he's NOT mistaken. :P Before my tubal (I had 4 c-sections in 5 years...medically it was important that we stop because it was getting dangerous), we used natural family planning. Not only does that give God total control of the size of my family - but it's CHEAP (um...free other than the paper for my chart)! ;) LOL
I have PCOS, so I never have to "worry" about when not to get pregnant: I just can't do it without a lot of effort. However, my husband and I have used NFP to help us get our Monkey. I'm not at all sure that we'd have him without it. I also had various medications to help me be more fertile in spite of the PCOS. We hope to have another soon!
I'm simply disturbed that none of the physicians who offered me the Pill offered me the information. Of course, I don't recall any of them offering me any information about side effects to me, or any sort of inquiry into why I was so irregular in the first place. Had they done the latter I might have been diagnosed with PCOS sooner and perhaps we would not have waited for 7 years to get our Monkey. But the ethical implications of using medications that are abortifcants are huge, and the hubris of the doctors, in presuming that they can choose for their patients in this case - because that's what they do when they don't tell us what we're doing - is.... I just can't believe they can do it and sleep at night. I think that abortion is murder. I'm NOT ok with it. And I certainly want to know about it if the medication that I'm offered may cause it!!! Knowing that there are those who feel that way (however non-PC that feeling is), I am amazed that they're not telling. I would feel so responsible for that information, in a doctor or pharmacist's place.
I wonder how many others are like your pharmacist. I was talking to someone -- Mom?? -- the other day about how so much of a doctor's education on drugs come right from the drug companies. On the one hand, there's nobody more familiar with the drugs. But there's also nobody with more to gain, or to loose, if the drugs don't do well.
Good post, and thanks for the link (both to my post, and to the story on the Pill- the future son-in-law was asking me for documentation he could send to a relative).
More people should know this.
I was on the pill for about six months after our first child was born. I hated it. Doctors tried to talk me into it at other times and places. Nobody ever told me about the abortificient properties , either.
I found out about them reading pro-life literature, and I tried to tell my friends about it- they just didn't believe me.
And here's the killer - there was a talk show once, maybe Oprah or Phil, where they had the woman who was then the leader of Right to Life, and she said the same thing. A doctor there to 'balance' said she was wrong, but then he went on to admit that yes, it did thin the lining of the uterus, making it incompatible with implantation, but that since it usually stopped you from getting pregnant in the first place, this only happened occasionally. And my best friend at the time insisted to me that this doctor's statement was proof that I was wrong, it wasn't an abortificient, even though he'd clearly just admitted that it was.
I wonder how well your friend understood the physiology of pregnancy. I find that stuff fascinating and I'm seriously considering a midwifery textbook for my collection of pregnancy books because the "over-the-counter" books from Barnes & Nobel tend to have very little new information in them. However, talking about thinned endometrium, which is incompatible with implantation, this is starting to be a bit of jargon. Where the doctor was saying no and explaining yes, you'd have to be able to clearly understand what he said, AND be listening closely to realize that his "evidence" was actually supporting the opposition. I went and found the full text of the article (the one I linked to in this post was a summary) and one of the things he talked about was WHY our doctors don't tell us what's really up with this. Basically, they don't know it either.
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