Columbus Dispatch newspaper continues smoke & mirrors defense of "Morning-after pill" (Mar.23, 06)

Letter to the editor, The Dispatch, submitted 3-21-06

Monday's editorial "No protection" argued against Representative Faber's House Bill 469, which would protect medical professionals from litigation and penalty if they refuse to prescribe the morning-after pill.  In the Dispatch's defense of the morning-after pill, all we got was more of the same smoke and mirrors.  Why does the Dispatch continue to beg the question in this debate?

"The morning-after pill does not interfere with pregnancy," the Dispatch claims, and yet two paragraphs later admits, "If fertilization has occurred, the pill might prevent implantation on the uterine wall."  This medication, dear Dispatch editors, does interfere with pregnancy because it prevents implantation.  Implantation is when pregnancy becomes measurable, but life begins before pregnancy is chemically measurable.  Life begins about a week earlier when the sperm fertilizes the egg in the fallopian tubes.  That is when you were conceived.  This is an unambiguous, scientific fact.  No arbitrary point after fertilization makes us any more alive or any more human than we were the moment before.  We're all just fertilized eggs grown up!

True, the morning-after pill may act as a contraceptive.  But a significant percentage of the time (the majority of the time according to a study published in the American Journal of Obstretrics & Gynecology in 1994) it acts after conception, when it causes the death of a living, growing human being by not allowing him or her to implant in the uterus.  The Ohio revised code already allows medical professionals to refuse to perform surgical abortions without penalty, and H.B. 469 is just a consistent application of the principles enshrined in current law.  Prescribing the morning-after pill is equivalent to shooting at someone with three bullets in a six-shooter.  Just as the three empty barrels do not justify pointing and shooting at someone, so the contraceptive potential of the morning-after pill does not justify prescribing it.  Dispensing it is a reckless disregard for human life, all of its contraceptive potential notwithstanding.  Not only should medical professionals have the right to refuse to dispense this medication without penalty, civil authorities should ban it, as they should all other forms of chemical and surgical child-killing.

Respectfully submitted,

James P. Johnston, D.O.

Director, Assn. of Pro-Life Physicians, www.ProLifePhysicians.org