Some Thoughts on The 'Morning After' Pill

New figures this morning show more abortions than ever. I���m not proposing a discussion on this. We all know what we think by now. But it is worth noting what is happening as a result of the laws we seem to have agreed to maintain.

 

As one report said: ���Some 200,608 abortions were carried out on women living in England and Wales last year ��� a 4 per cent rise on 2017. Fifty-six per cent of the women had already had at least one child or stillbirth. In 2008 the figure was 48 per cent.���

 

 

All kinds of attempts have been and will be made to blame this figure on try cuts, or some such. Well, yes, of course that;s the reason.

But, fascinatingly, the figures showed something else too. The same report stated:  ���It might be easy to assume that the rise in abortions is fuelled by unwanted pregnancies among the young but it is older women who are driving it. The potential reasons for this are many, from changes in child benefits to career and mortgage pressures.

 

���Abortion rates have plummeted among teenagers. Rates in under-16s are less than a third of their 2008 level and in 16 and 17-year-olds have more than halved.

 

���It is attributed to the drive to improve sex education and provide easier access to contraception������

 

Well, attribute it how you like. But the re;lentlless iupward curve in under-age pregnancies, which we all grew used to from the 1950s onwards, has definitely come to an end/.

 

Some say this is the result of the sex-education which has bene intensively provided since long before the downturn. Oddly, this doesn���t seem to prevent continuing high rates of sexually transmitted disease among the same age group.

 

So the second explanation, so-called ���easier access to contraception��� might have something to do with it. Or, more accurately, the increasing availability of the ���morning after pill��� For many years before the downturn, contraception was plentifully available and more or less pressed upon the young at easily accessible clinics and even in schools. I recently got into a Twitter argument when I suggested that the morning after pill was not exactly contraception, but something subtly and importantly different (which is why I think it has succeeded where contraception failed).

 

Hence my link to this interesting (though obviously partial) discussion of exactly what the morning after pill is and does.

 

https://righttolife.org.uk/news/just-say-oui-informed-debate-emergency-contraception/

 

 

It is perhaps neither as simple nor as morally straightforward as many believe.

 

By the way, some time ago I tried and completely failed to obtain figures on the numbers of morning after pills distributed to teenagers in this country, over the past 15 years or so, or indeed on its use in general since it came into common use around 2002. There is this, frankly incredible, survey

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995725/

which caused me to make futile inquiries of the manufacturers to see if they could give me figures for production, which they somehow couldn't.

If anyone has any idea where these are to be found, I���d be most grateful.

 

But in the USA there is some information.  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db112.htm

Which seems to suggest a revolution almost as great as that caused by the introduction of the original contraceptive pill nearly 50 years before.

 

This would not have been possible without a moral revolution as well. People will sooner or later have to start coping that we have undergone such a revolution, and that it has far wider implications for our attitude towards life itself than the freedom to abort unborn babies.

 

The implications, vast as mountains, are only beginning to emerge from the thick clouds which have obscured them from the sight of the heedless and complacent for so long.