The pill as abortafacient

Kenneth Hynek • 15th May 2008 • Health, Health, Reproduction, Health, Sex, Society
abortion, Alan Guttmacher Institute, birth control, CDC, Centers for Disease Control, cervical mucus, contraception, ovulation, ovum, pregnancy, sperm, the pill, unborn, uterus, women

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

It turns out that the pill — that ubiquitous birth control method — is responsible for a potentially massive number of pregnancy terminations every year.

And yes, I realize that the point of taking the pill is, in most cases, to avoid getting pregnant. That doesn’t change the fact that a potentially massive number of implantations are being prevented, in essence aborting perhaps millions of unborn children at the very earliest stages of development.

Women on BCPs [birth control pills] have 28-day cycles and thus have 13 cycles/year (365/28 = 13.3).

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute , 10,410,000 U.S. women are current pill users, a figure that constitutes 26.9% of all those using some method of contraception.

Gambrell notes that there is a 14% breakthrough ovulation rate in females taking the 50 microgram pills (10,410,000 x .14 = 1,457,400 ovulations each cycle). (1)

1,457,400 x 13 cycles/year = 18,946,200 possible exposures to pregnancy each year.

Since the normal fecundity rate (chance of pregnancy without using contraceptives) for the average couple is 20%, and if we were to suppose that the cervical mucus change cut down the sperm reaching the ovum by 50% (a very generous allowance), that means that there would be 20% x 50% x 18,946,200= 1,894,620 fertilized ovums that would have otherwise implanted in the walls of the uterus.

Of this number, the accepted rate for “pill pregnancies” is 3-5 per 100 women years i.e 3%-5%. (2)

This means that 95-97% of these unborn babies were prevented from implanting in the lining of the womb because of the oral contraceptive’s thinning of the endometrium (#3 above).

In other words, approximately 1,800,000 (95% x 1,894,620) babies die every year through the use of oral contraceptives.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legally induced abortions in the US in 2003.

Therefore the ratio between BCP abortion vs. conventional abortions is 2.2:1. This means that for every ONE women aborting through conventional means in the U.S., more than TWO women are aborting through the use of oral contraceptives.