Purify Your Bride

“One of the most troubling aspects of the proposed rules is the overly-broad definition of ‘abortion,’” write Clinton and Murray. “This definition would allow health-care corporations or individuals to classify many common forms of contraception — including the birth control pill, emergency contraception and IUDs — ‘abortions’ and therefore to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

So what is this terrible broad definition? It is just basing the beginning of life at conception. The government changed the definition of abortion to anything terminating a pregnancy after implantation. The trouble is that if you believe life begins at conception you end up making some of the most common types of birth control into abortificants. So rather than swallow this truth and saying the pill is immoral people play with words. The problem is there was a lot of evangelicals using the pill when it became clear that it can allow conception and then cause the death of that child. Most of them didn’t want to give up the pill so they convinced themselves this new information did not matter.

It is just another hair splitting challenge for people who reject abortion and embrace contraception. The two flow into each other and are sometime hard to distinguish. The emergency contraceptions are more of the same. How do you make sense of an ordinary process producing something sacred? How do you care about one part of the reproduction and not the whole thing? It is nonsense and it is a big reason why the prolife arguments have not won the day. They are not willing to push them to their logical conclusion and say artifical birth control is wrong as well.