Earlier this fall, the Connecticut Catholic bishops decided to comply with a state law requiring all hospitals to administer the morning after pill—Plan B. In a daily article for our homepage, Michael Augros wrote an open letter to the bishops asking them to reconsider. Augros, a professor of philosophy at the Center for Higher Studies in Thornwood, New York, pointed to scientific studies that suggested the active drug in Plan B—levonorgestrel—could function not only as a contraceptive, but as an abortifacient. He wrote to the bishops:
Your statement that “the administration of Plan B pills in this instance [in Catholic hospitals and to victims of rape and after a pregnancy test] cannot be judged to be the commission of an abortion because of such doubt about how Plan B pills and similar drugs work and because of the current impossibility of knowing from the ovulation test whether a new life is present” is puzzling to me. That is, I wonder how the matter can be as doubtful as you suggest. Is there really any doubt that Plan B is at least believed by medical experts and lawmakers to act in what Catholics must consider an abortifacient mode if it acts after fertilization but prior to implantation?
The new issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly may help explain the doubt to Augros. Writing in the Winter 2007 issue, Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. , professor of biology at Providence College, and an expert pro-life Catholic bioethicist, concludes his article, ” Is Plan B an Abortifacient? A Critical Look at the Scientific Evidence ” (sub req), with this:
Studies published in the past few months provide mounting evidence that levonorgestrel has little or no effect on post-fertilization events. In other words, given the limitations of scientific certitude, they suggest that Plan B, when administered once, is not an abortifacient. These human studies correlate well with earlier findings in rodents and monkeys that convincingly showed that the postcoital administration of levonorgestrel in amounts several times higher than typical doses given to women does not interfere with the post-fertilization processes required for mammalian embryo implantation. The evidence also addresses what until now has been a nagging, unanswerable question for pharmacologists: Why would levonorgestrel, a progesterone agonist that mimics the effect of progesterone, prevent implantation, when progesterone produced from the corpus luteum immediately after ovulation actually promotes implantation by converting the endometrium to decidua? Answer: It does not.But what about the manufacturer’s label? Much has been made about the claim made by Barr Pharmaceuticals that Plan B “may also prevent fertilization of a released egg (joining of sperm and egg) or attachment of a fertilized egg to the uterus (implantation).” Labels mean nothing without the scientific data to back up their claims.
I doubt that this article is the definitive last word on the issue, but you should give the entire article a read. If you’re not a subscriber to the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly , you should be .
