In honor of tomorrow's embryology exam, I thought I'd post a recent Bill Saletan article about (surprise!) abortion.

For those unwilling to click-and-skim, the basic gist is that a new Department of Health and Human Services regulation is aiming to "protect the right of employees to refuse to facilitate any abortifacient chemical or activity", where abortion is essentially defined as the expulsion of a fertilized egg. No doubt the aim of the regulation is to protect employees with who wanted to flex their conscientious objection muscles by refusing participation in anything from second term abortion down to the provision of emergency contraception ("Plan B", as Duramed Pharmaceuticals would have you view as a synonym).

Saletan points out, however, that lots of everyday activities would be abortion-enabling, by this definition; breastfeeding, exercise, and caffeine consumption have all been shown to hinder implantation of a fertilized egg. It seems incredibly unlikely that employees refusing to serve coffee will be protected under this new regulation.

This illustrates a larger trend I often see - the frequent lack of consistency that peppers pro-life rhetoric and pro-life policy. Plan B is a great example. If you look through the literature on the mechanism of emergency contraception, you basically find that it's not exactly clear how it works to prevent pregnancy. It's probably a three pronged attack: prevent ovulation, prevent fertilization, and/or prevent implantation. The last prong is what gets the conscientious objectors going - if you believe a fertilized egg is a human being, in some core sense (like Gomez-Lobo), you view obstacles to implantation as thwarting a human being's life.

Fine. Let that belief stand for the time being. The thing is that Plan B is essentially nothing more than a double dose of traditional oral contraceptives - you know, the kind that 12 million US women use daily. The Pill also works, most likely, with the same three pronged attack, blocking ovulation, fertilization, or implantation. It's likely that it works primarily by stopping ovulation, but recent studies show that's true of Plan B, too. They're basically the same chemical, after all. Both have a small but statistically possible chance of stopping pregnancy by preventing implantation.

But rarely do you have the same strong stand for pharmacists who don't provide the Pill that you do for those who refuse Plan B. (Put aside those communities who don't hang with any form of contraception at all.) And that doesn't really make sense. Your stance on the Pill and Plan B really have to hang together, since they're essentially doing the same biological thing.

It seems that pro-life regulations are essentially focused on the intent of the abortifacient - in these folks' minds, Plan B is meant to pull the rug out from a pregnancy, whereas the Pill is meant to stop one in the first place. Things like coffee drinking, breastfeeding, and exercise are even further from the realm of reproduction. But if you really and truly believe that that little one-celled thing is a human, you shouldn't care about intent. We certainly don't view soldiers killed by friendly fire as any less dead than those killed by the enemy, right? The fact that no one is crusading for the rights of embryos destroyed by caffeine (or hey, campaigning for research to end the miscarriages that end the lives so many embryos) always makes me suspicious of the motivations driving so many pro-life regulations.