Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice - Part 2 - Science

Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice

In 1960, nine years after Margaret Sanger secured a grant from her organization Planned Parenthood for Gregory Pincus to begin work developing a synthetic hormone that could be used for birth control, the FDA approved the “magic pill” Margaret had been dreaming of since 1912 when she was a nurse on New York’s Lower East Side. Immediately the pharmaceutical industry envisioned a huge market and nine American companies quickly developed a version of the Pill.

In 1966 the FDA looked into the common side effects of the Pill and though the task force did not find conclusive evidence that the Pill caused negative side effects they did allow pill manufacturers to lower the hormone levels and put the Pill back on the market with less rules and regulations.

In 1969 the FDA took another look at the Pill and reported that if the Pill failed to suppress ovulation (its primary role), the second major effect of the Pill was to prevent implantation of the embryo in the wall of the mother’s womb. This was not good news for Planned Parenthood.

Just six years earlier in 1963, the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare had issued a leaflet that defined abortion as “all the measures which impair the viability of the zygote at any time between the instant of fertilization and the completion of labor.”

Furthermore, until 1972, the three major medical dictionaries defined fertilization (the union of spermatozoon and oocyte to form a zygote) as the moment of conception. If the Pill prevented implantation of a fertilized zygote, then it would medically be considered an abortifacient. But what if the definition of conception was changed? What if successful implantation was defined as the moment of conception?

Bent Boving a Swedish researcher was way ahead of the curve. He had already planted that thought in the minds of those gathered at a 1959 Planned Parenthood/Population Council symposium when he made his comment: “The fact of giving implantation control the advantage of being socially considered as conception prevention rather than the destruction of an initiated established pregnancy is simply the habit of prudent language.”

In other words all social engineers have to do is say that conception doesn’t begin at fertilization, but it begins at successful implantation. If enough important people say this enough times, the habit of prudent language will make it the acceptable standard or as Vladimir Lenin stated, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

In 1972, Stedman’s became the first medical dictionary to define conception as the “successful implantation of the blastocyst in the uterine lining.” A year later brought the favorable decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. As Planned Parenthood celebrated their victory they realized they now had another definition in need of manipulation. At what moment does a fetus become a human person? The answer is as simple as the habit of prudent language.

Planned Parenthood is at the forefront of semantic gymnastics using the art of prudent language to further their cause. On their page “Expert’s Answer Common Sexual Health Questions, Planned Parenthood states that most medical authorities agree with them that life begins when a baby takes its first breath. Does anyone else feel like America is the frog simmering in the Planned Parenthood’s kettle?

Part two, Planned Parenthood – Life Begins with Genetic Semantics and the Medical Dictionary Conundrum, illustrates why certain definitions have been socially engineered, why Planned Parenthood has an interest these definitions, and contrasts Planned Parenthood’s definition of the beginning of life with a scientific perspective.

For more details on the science of life - please see this updated blog post.

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Cover of Life Magazine April 30, 1965 - Photo by Lennart Nilsson (fetus 18 weeks)
Photographs by Lennart Nilsson (fetus 7 weeks, 10 weeks, 20 weeks) From A Child Is Born:  The Drama of Life Before Birth published 1965
Life Magazine Photo by Max Aguilera-Hellweg taken in July 1999 of Sarah Marie Switzer at 24 weeks during an operation for spina bifida.  After the operation she was reinserted into her mother's womb and born two months later nine weeks premature.