When we think of abortion, we think of the babies lost through abortion procedures – whether they be surgical, like a D&C, or medical, in the form of RU-486.
But what of those whose lives are ended before they even had the chance to find a home in their mother’s womb?
The use of hormonal contraceptives, which have a back-up mode of action making the womb hostile to receiving new life is increasing.
IUD’s (with or without hormonal action) also work as abortifacients.
IVF creates embryos which will never be given the opportunity to grow and develop.
In New Zealand, we are seeing a year-on-year drop in induced abortion statistics. Our worse year was 2007, when 18,380 unborn children were aborted. This declined to 14,745 in 2012.
But over the last few years organisations such as Family Planning have been pushing for women (and young girls) to use Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARCs) such as the Jadelle implant and Mirena (an IUD).
According to the Ministry of Health, 1,180 prescriptions were given in 2003 for Mirena. By 2012 this number had jumped to 4598.
The stats for Jadelle are astonishing, and show just how successful the push for this implant has been. In 2010, which is when the device became funded by Pharmac, there were 3,808 prescriptions. By 2012 the number of scripts had jumped to 13,860. Over the three-year period of 2010 to 2012, doctors had prescribed Jadelle 31,196 times!
These statistics don’t include the Morning After Pill, the Copper IUD, Depo Provera or the combined oral contraceptive pill.
Those who promote abortifacient contraception try to confuse the general public by saying that these devices do not cause early abortions. They can do this because pregnancy has been redefined to begin when the embryo implants in the womb as opposed to conception (when the sperm fertilises the egg and a new life begins)!
And this fallacy – that pregnancy only begins when the embryo implants – is being perpetrated even today, starting at young ages.
Take Family Planning’s Open and Honest Parent Workbook (2012). Ignoring all the sexually explicit information which is the subject for another blog, we skip to page 28 which is the beginning of a “Conception Activity”. This activity is from Family Planning’s programme The Sexuality Road which is aimed at Year 5 to 8 children (9 to 12/13 year olds). In the activity children are asked to match short descriptions of the “conception process” to images. The answers are found on page 44, where a diagram of a tiny baby is nestled inside the womb with the words “pregnancy”.
Why is it so important to redefine pregnancy? Because then abortifacients such as Jadelle, Mirena and the Pill become quite acceptable to the general public. No little ones are lost. Organisations such as Family Planning have a vested interest in being able to push these “contraceptives”.
Redefining pregnancy also makes IVF an acceptable “procedure”. If one isn’t pregnant until the embryo is successfully implanted into the womb, then the embryos have little worth apart from their potential to “become” human beings (forgetting of course that an embryo is a human being in it’s very nascent stage). Hundreds of thousands of embryos have never even had the opportunity to grow past a certain point as they have been created outside of the human body. Hundreds of thousands of embryos have been discarded because they are not deemed to be “good”, or because they are no longer needed.
So let us not forget that while the number of induced abortions are going down each year, thousands more forgotten babies are lost through abortifacients and IVF.
And that is something NOT to celebrate.
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