On Contraceptives vs. Abortifacients

The political outrage of the moment is the assertion that SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh thinks that contraceptives and abortifacients are the same thing. HuffPost provides a sample article with the contention that “Kavanaugh] referred to contraception as ‘abortion-inducing drugs.'” and then a quote from the EVP of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund:

Kavanaugh referred to birth control ― something more than 95 percent of women use in their lifetime ― as an ‘abortion-inducing drug,’ which is not just flat-out wrong, but is anti-woman, anti-science propaganda.

This is a convenient narrative for pro-choice activists, who routinely smear the pro-life movement as being motivated by regressive prudery or just an outright “War on Women.” They would have you believe that pro-lifers are out to control women’s reproduction, and therefore pro-lifers oppose contraception and abortion as one and the same thing.

None of this is true.

First, it’s not true that the pro-life movement conflates contraceptives and abortifacients. These are two very different things. Abortifacients act after fertilization to cause the death of an innocent human being. Opposition to this–at least, in elective cases–is the core of the pro-life cause.

Contraceptives, on the other hand, act to prevent fertilization. If there’s no fertilization then no human life is at stake. So the pro-life movement has no relevance here.

It’s true that some pro-life people view contraception as immoral. It’s also true that some pro-life people would like to bring school prayer back. But just because they do, it doesn’t make school prayer a pro-life issue. It just shows that there’s overlap between people who are pro-life and people who like school prayer. Same concept here: there’s overlap between people who are pro-life and people who view contraceptives as immoral, but opposition to contraceptives (morally or legally) has nothing to do with the pro-life cause because there isn’t a human life directly at stake. 

Second, returning to Kavanuagh specifically: he knows this. Much as Planned Parenthood would like to scare up some more donor dollars by terrifying people with the specter of a crazed misogynist who can’t tell the difference between contraception and abortion, Kavanaugh’s dissent in Priests for Life vs. HHS (which is what Ted Cruz was asking Kavanugh about) makes clear that he is perfectly aware of the difference:

By regulation, that insurance must cover all FDA-approved contraceptives, including certain methods of birth control that, some believe, operate as abortifacients and result in the destruction of embryos.

Page 1 of Kavanaugh’s dissent.

The drug that Kavanugh is talking about is levonorgestrel. In low doses, levonorgestrel is a contraceptive that acts by preventing fertilization. This raises no pro-life concerns. But levonorgestrel is also available in a much higher dosage as the emergency contraceptive Plan B. In this higher dosage–and taken after sex (which is the whole point of an emergency contraceptive)–levonorgestrel may kick in after fertilization has already occurred and prevent an embryo from implanting. This is the scenario that concerns pro-lifers, because once fertilization takes place we have a new, living human being and the entire point of the pro-life movement is that it shouldn’t be legally permissible to electively kill human beings.

So, contrary to Planned Parenthood propaganda, Kavanaugh isn’t attacking all contraceptives. He’s not even attacking all uses of levonorgestrel. In fact, he’s not attacking anything at all.  He’s merely pointing out that “some believe” (i.e. Priests for Life believe) that in this particular case, levonorgestrel may act as an abortifacient and not as a contraceptive.

Is the concern reasonable? Probably.

The question of whether or not Plan B can act as an abortifacient is incredibly controversial because it has to do with abortion, but Wikipedia (with a citation) concludes that “While it is unlikely that emergency contraception affects implantation it is impossible to completely exclude the possibility of post-fertilization effect.”

One last important thing before we wrap up. There’s a lot of sophistry surrounding the issue of whether or not Plan B is an abortifacient. WebMD is a case-in-point:

Plan B One-Step is not the same as RU-486, which is an abortion pill. It does not cause a miscarriage or abortion. In other words, it does not stop development of a fetus once the fertilized egg implants in the uterus. So it will not work if you are already pregnant when you take it.

This is misleading because they’re relying on a technical definition of pregnancy that doesn’t have anything to do with the moral issue at hand. Their argument is that pregnancy starts at implantation rather than fertilization. If Plan B stops an embryo from implanting, then it hasn’t interrupted a pregnancy because technically the pregnancy hasn’t started yet. Therefore it can’t be an abortion, because there is no pregnancy to abort. This is all technically true and yet at the same time ethically irrelevant, since the germane issue is not whether a pregnancy has ended but whether or not a human life has ended. 

Other sources, like NPR, have covered the issue much more responsibly and still conclude that Plan B is not an abortifacient because it doesn’t block implantation, only fertilization. If that is demonstrably proven (my understanding is that the jury is still out) then Plan B will no longer be a pro-life concern.

Ultimately none of this will be persuasive to people who are pro-choice because it seems self-evident that an embryo only a day or so old is not really what we mean by “a human life” even if, speaking scientifically, it is in fact a distinct, living human organism. I understand that, and I’m not going to address that aspect of the debate today.

My point is simply this: Kavanaugh in particular did not conflate all contraceptives with abortifacients and the pro-life movement in general is similarly able to tell the difference between these two very distinct things.

7 thoughts on “On Contraceptives vs. Abortifacients”

  1. One of my issues with the pro-life stance is the criminalization of abortion. Implantation does not always happen. Fertilized eggs often fail to implant. Miscarriages also happen frequently and naturally. Are we going to open criminal investigations on any woman who happens to have a miscarriage? How else would we know she has not taken an illegal substance to cause the miscarriage/abortion? If you do this, you cannot help but cause pain for women and families who *want* to have children but have run into bad luck.

    My wife had a miscarriage, and she was depressed for months. I would have been irate if anyone had come asking questions about it, and probably would have been arrested for trying to prevent them from doing their job.

    Oh yeah, and we were legally required to sit through a discussion designed to make women seeking an abortion feel guilty, in order to get the medical procedure to remove the already-dead fetus, while we were still grieving.

    If you’re looking for justice, criminalization is not the answer.

  2. The pro-life movement routinely follows a consequentialist calculus in which it does things virtually all of its members admit are wrong in service of the greater good of preventing abortions. For example, they falsely claim that the motive for requiring abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges is the protection of women’s health. We all agree that lying is wrong, but the pro-life movement does it anyway.

    I think something similar is happening with the anti-woman agenda. You’re clearly right that an individual need not hold anti-woman views to hold pro-life ones. However, the organizations which constitute the movement have determined that allying with, promoting, and empowering those who do pursue such an agenda gets them closer to the fifth vote they need to overturn Roe.

    To me, all of this seems in tension with Christian ethics. If one is complicit in abortion if one signs a form which has the result of allowing someone else to pay for abortion if a third person chooses it, surely one is also complicit in anti-woman policies if one chooses to make those one knows will pursue those policies famous and powerful. Refusing to do evil for the greater good is the cornerstone of the most inspiring stories of Christian moral courage and integrity I’ve heard.

    So, yes, you’re right that the attack on Kavanaugh oversimplifies his statement. But, in doing so, it correctly characterizes him as complicit in promoting an anti-woman agenda. How much should we care that he hasn’t committed to desiring those policies in those of his writings we’ve been allowed to see?

  3. Tyler-

    Fertilized eggs often fail to implant. Miscarriages also happen frequently and naturally. Are we going to open criminal investigations on any woman who happens to have a miscarriage?

    I am very sorry about your wife’s miscarriage, and I would never want anyone to exacerbate a tragedy like that. In this case, there’s no reason that criminalizing abortion would. That’s because your first sentence answers your question in the second. Because miscarriages are common, it would not make sense to open a criminal investigation for one, even if abortion were illegal.

  4. Kelsey-

    For example, they falsely claim that the motive for requiring abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges is the protection of women’s health. We all agree that lying is wrong, but the pro-life movement does it anyway.

    I don’t think this is fair. Just look at Kermit Gosnell. He’s far from alone. Clearly there are genuine concerns about women’s health, and it’s the pro-choice side that is being hypocritical in this regard. Gosnell’s house of horrors was protected by pro-choice zealotry.

    the organizations which constitute the movement have determined that allying with, promoting, and empowering those who do pursue such an agenda gets them closer to the fifth vote they need to overturn Roe.

    Could you be specific? I have no idea what these overtly anti-woman groups are that pro-life groups are allegedly allying with.

    if a third person chooses it, surely one is also complicit in anti-woman policies if one chooses to make those one knows will pursue those policies famous and powerful.

    Again: I’ve got no idea what, specifically, you’re talking about. Can you point to a concrete pro-life organization and their alliance with a concrete anti-woman organization?

    So, yes, you’re right that the attack on Kavanaugh oversimplifies his statement. But, in doing so, it correctly characterizes him as complicit in promoting an anti-woman agenda.

    It doesn’t “oversimplify.” It misleads. And I’m still at a loss for the actual anti-woman agenda you’re alluding to. What is it, and what are the groups supporting it? And where do they ally with pro-life groups?

  5. “I don’t think this is fair. Just look at Kermit Gosnell. He’s far from alone. Clearly there are genuine concerns about women’s health, and it’s the pro-choice side that is being hypocritical in this regard.”

    Have you checked into the evidentiary basis for requiring hospital admitting privileges at all? Here’s one source of many, which seems like a sensible brief overview:

    https://www.guttmacher.org/evidence-you-can-use/targeted-regulation-abortion-providers-trap-laws

    It’s pretty overwhelming. Even your own example doesn’t support your case. The problem with Gosnell wasn’t that he was a well-meaning doctor sincerely concerned with patient care, but unable to get his patients into a nearby hospital. It was that he appears to have been a reprehensible human being who would have avoided giving evidence of his misdeeds by transferring his patients to the care of better doctors even if he’d had such privileges. He was already violating numerous laws. If you claim that your reason for supporting a law is a case which that law wouldn’t have addressed, it’s reasonable to treat your claim as a mere pretext. It works exactly the same way when gun control supporters cite a mass shooting with a handgun as evidence that we need stricter assault weapons controls. Maybe we do need those controls, but we all know the reason cited isn’t the reason they want them.

    As for the rest, let’s think for a bit about what an outlet like HuffPo means by “anti-woman” or “War on Women”. To liberals, it means rolling back the progress toward equality and autonomy made in the past half-century or so. If you support measures which would make women less able to make their own decisions or reduce their access to power, wealth, education, or jobs, you’re anti-woman in liberals’ eyes. Some conservatives genuinely feel that some measures which would have one or more of these effects would nevertheless be good for women, and so they don’t feel these negative terms are justified. For the purposes of judging whether a publication is misleading an audience it reasonably expects to be mostly liberals, that’s irrelevant. The article only misleads if its mostly-liberal readership would have false beliefs as a result of reading it.

    Kavanaugh specifically and the pro-life movement generally pretty straightforwardly participate in the war on women, as understood by liberals. Even setting aside the issue of abortion, which is a clear example of attempting to make women less able to make decisions about their own bodies, you acknowledged the existence of the sorts of allies I’m talking about in your original post. Some high-profile examples are the Catholic Church (which opposes contraception and bars women from its most important jobs) and Focus on the Family (which opposes many methods of contraception and, due to its view of complementarity, undermines womens’ independence and financial success). But it’s not just allies–perhaps the most mainstream pro-life position is federal defunding of Planned Parenthood, even though federal funds for PP are already unavailable for abortion. This is literally the attempt to stop the government from paying for contraception and women’s health care; that’s all that money can be used for.

    So, does that seem like the sort of thing Kavanaugh would support? It seems to me pretty clear he would. He doesn’t seem particularly originalist, or tied to any very constraining theory of judicial interpretation. He’s a conservative with a flexible enough understanding of the Constitution that he’ll reach conservative results whenever he wants. That’s going to mean that, as a justice, the people who want to reduce women’s power and independence are likely to have his vote whenever they can get four others. Do you imagine that there’s some case in which that might not be true? Because, if not, articles saying he’s anti-women don’t seem to me to mislead. That’s what that means for a SCOTUS justice.

  6. It continues to surprise me that people still make the argument that federal funds don’t help Planned Parenthood perform abortions. Money is fungible, but beyond that, the same people say that if PP is defunded it will have to close clinics, many of which provide abortions. In other words, it is only able to provide abortions out of numerous clinics *because federal funds keep those clinics open*. Pro-life people don’t care if specific dollars (a) directly pay for abortions, (b) pay for other stuff so other dollars are free to pay for abortions, or (c) prop up organizations in other ways so they can keep performing abortions. It all comes to the same thing: taxes help Planned Parenthood perform far more abortions. Pointing out that method (a) isn’t the way it happens doesn’t make much difference to the pro-life side.

  7. Monica, that seems inconsistent with the moral basis claimed. Perhaps there’s a more nuanced perspective than I’m familiar with, but what you’ve described sounds like intent doesn’t matter, only effects, and that end of reducing abortions justifies the means of denying medical care to poor women. I had taken the basis of a great deal of American opposition to abortion to be founded in Christian morality which explicitly rejects consequentialism and ends-justify-the-means reasoning. Could you clarify?

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