Would You Like Fried with Your Morning-After Pill?

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 1/15/04)

So, a panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to make the morning-after pill an over-the-counter drug, lined up for sale on drugstore and supermarket shelves alongside the cough drops and the laxatives. If this effort succeeds, it will be another landmark in the ongoing trivialization of sex.

The FDA itself hasn’t yet approved the panel’s recommendation, put forward in a December vote, and maybe it won’t. The federal agency is supposed to take up the matter in February.

However this turns out, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger would be ecstatic that it’s gotten this far. In a 1915 sex education manual for adolescents, Sanger wrote that "to free all inhibitions" (sic) was nothing less than the very "aim of life." If the time ever comes when you can buy a do-it-yourself abortifacient and cornflakes in a single stop, there won’t be too many inhibitions left to target.

"Abortifacient" is correct, incidentally. The morning-after pill blocks pregnancy in either of two ways. Reporter Gina Kolata describes them in The New York Times, hardly a journal of pro-life propaganda: "While [the pill] usually acts by preventing ovulation, it also may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting." This second mode of action is early abortion.

Offhand, I can think of three chief moral arguments against the morning-after pill.

The first, of course, is the contraceptive argument. A woman who takes this drug to block pregnancy sets her will against the human good of procreation.

The second is the abortion argument. Since a woman who takes the morning-after pill can’t know whether it will or won’t cause an early abortion, she is willingly accepting abortion as a possible outcome in taking the pill.

The third argument is a bit more difficult to explain. It boils down to this: the morning-after pill is, as suggested above, one more giant step toward realizing Margaret Sanger’s goal of robbing sex of its human meaning.

For a century now, the birth control movement launched by Sanger and others has labored long and hard — and with considerable success — on behalf of what might be called sex without consequences or recreational sex.

This way of approaching it puts sex in roughly the same category as eating a candy bar or drinking a beer. It is one more activity among many about which individuals can quite naturally say, "I love it."

By contrast, freely chosen sex between a man and woman who wish to give sexual expression to a covenantal marriage relationship is an activity by which these two persons express the meaning, "I love you."

Plainly there is an enormous gulf between saying "I love it" and saying "I love you." Sex without consequences depersonalizes sex.

Selling the morning-after pill as an over-the-counter drug for casual use after casual sex is a paradigm of the "I love it" approach to human sexuality. Great poetry has been written about the grandeur — and sometimes the tragedy — of sex that carries true human meaning, but trivialized sex hardly rates a greeting card jingle. This is the difference between "Romeo and Juliet" and a smutty sitcom.

Perhaps there will be enough of an outcry over the FDA panel’s action to halt this bad idea dead in its tracks. Or perhaps there won’t. This has been the drift of things for a long time. Years ago, Margaret Sanger proclaimed that "social factors have been thrust aside" and "moral codes have been weak and helpless."

We may find abortion-producing contraceptives down the aisle from the cornflakes one of these days.

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