Contraception

If you did not know, this page is written to inform you, not to accuse you.

They moved a word, and a week of a child’s life vanished behind it

Until the 1960s, “conception” meant the moment a new life begins: the union of egg and sperm. Then a medical body redefined it.

In 1965 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists ruled that conception and pregnancy now began at implantation, six to twelve days later, when the days-old child settles into the womb. No discovery prompted the change. At a 1959 symposium run by the Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council, Dr Bent Boving had stated the advantage openly: whether a method was seen as preventing conception or destroying a pregnancy could depend on “something so simple as a prudent habit of speech”.[1][2]

The child did not move. Only the word did. Anything that ends a life in that first week can now be called contraceptive rather than abortifacient, because the life it ends has been defined out of “pregnancy” before the argument begins.

Britain reached the same place by a different road: a courtroom, not a committee. No UK statute ever defined pregnancy or conception. In 2002 the High Court settled the legal meaning: there is no established pregnancy, and so no miscarriage, before implantation.[3] The Government had already told Parliament in 2000 that emergency contraception works “before a pregnancy has been established”.[4] So in British law, a method that ends a life in that first week is not an abortion at all. Not because the child is less alive, but because the law starts counting a week after he does.

The third mechanism, in their own words

Hormonal contraceptives are designed to work in up to three ways. They stop the egg being released. They thicken the mucus to block sperm. And if both fail and a child is conceived, a third mechanism thins the lining of the womb so that the living child cannot take hold, and is lost. The first two prevent a life. The third can end one that has already begun.

You do not have to take our word for it. Take theirs, printed in their own licensed documents.

The official product information for Microgynon 30, a common UK combined pill, lists among its actions “the rendering of the endometrium unreceptive to implantation”.[5] The endometrium is the lining of the womb, the place a newly conceived child must settle to live. That is the manufacturer’s phrase, in the document the regulator requires before the pill can be sold.

The hormonal coil says the same. Mirena’s licensed information lists the “prevention of proliferation of the endometrium”.[6]

The NHS says it too. Its guidance states that an IUD can stop a fertilised egg from implanting in the womb.[7] A fertilised egg is a living human embryo, days old. The mechanism is admitted and the word “abortion” withheld in a single breath, because pregnancy has been redefined to begin at implantation.

The copper coil, and the hedge

The UK clinical guideline licenses the copper coil as emergency contraception up to five days after intercourse.[8] Sit with the arithmetic. Conception can occur within hours of ovulation. If the coil is fitted on day five and conception happened on day one, the child has existed for days before the device goes in.

We give the mainstream answer fairly, because it is a real argument and not a dodge. The guideline says the coil’s primary mechanism is inhibition of fertilisation, by copper’s toxic effect on sperm and egg. That may still operate in the five-day window. We will not hide it from you.

But the guideline then says the rest, plainly: if fertilisation does occur, the inflammatory reaction in the womb lining prevents implantation.[8] The licensing document itself admits the thing in question. Even the International Planned Parenthood Federation grants it: if fertilisation has taken place, copper ions impair the receptivity of the womb lining.[9] That hedge is the crux. When the coil is fitted late, it may be doing the one thing left for it to do: preventing a living, conceived child from taking hold. Not certainly. Possibly, and admittedly, and with no one recording it. Where a human life hangs on that “possibly”, the possibility is the whole of the matter.

Where the evidence has moved, we say so

Our credibility rests on claiming no more than the evidence allows.

For the levonorgestrel morning-after pill, the evidence has moved against part of the popular pro-life case. In December 2022 the American regulator agreed to remove the implantation language from Plan B’s label; the current position of the FDA and FIGO is that it acts mainly by delaying ovulation and is not shown to prevent implantation.[10] We say so, and we do not rest the argument on it.

The copper coil’s admitted mechanism and the labelled endometrial effects of the pill and hormonal coil have not moved. The case rests on what remains admitted, in the makers’ own documents.

Why your doctor never mentioned it

Your doctor is not deceiving you. He is telling you the truth as his profession has defined it. In UK law a child lost before implantation is not a lost pregnancy, so his loss is not an abortion, and is legally the loss of nothing that must be counted or disclosed. Even the duty of informed consent cannot reach it: since Montgomery v Lanarkshire (2015) a doctor must disclose the material risks to a pregnancy, but in law there is no pregnancy yet, so there is no risk to disclose.[11] The definition is the problem, not the man behind the counter.

The church held this line for nineteen centuries

This is not a Roman Catholic novelty. It was the unbroken teaching of the whole church, East and West. Calvin wrote of the child in the womb on Exodus 21 that he “is already a human being”. The Westminster Confession defined marriage partly by “the increase of mankind”, and the 1689 Baptist Confession kept the same words.

The break was British. In 1920 the Lambeth Conference gave an emphatic warning against unnatural means of avoiding conception. Ten years later the same conference reversed itself: Resolution 15 of 1930 permitted contraception in limited circumstances, passing by 193 votes to 67 against the protest of a substantial number of its own bishops. With that vote the Church of England became the first major Christian communion to permit it in any circumstance. One regional body had moved earlier: peer-reviewed research records that the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church sanctioned birth control shortly before Lambeth, the only ecclesiastical body in Europe or North America to do so.[12][13] The exception proves the scale of the consensus it broke. The novelty is not this page. The novelty is our silence.

Every quotation above is traced to a primary source in the treatises, where the full case is set out — including the open letter to church leaders.

You have now been told

“Rescue those who are being taken away to death… If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?” (Proverbs 24:11–12)

Do not take our word for it. Check every source below. If it proves true, act as you would want someone to act for you, if it were your life hidden in that unnamed week. Talk with your husband or wife. Come off any method that carries this mechanism; where there is real reason to wait, fertility-awareness methods carry no such mechanism. Receive children the way God does: “a heritage from the LORD” (Psalm 127:3). And for anything done in ignorance, hear the same word Paul heard, who “acted ignorantly in unbelief” and “received mercy” (1 Timothy 1:13): the blood of Christ cleanses all sin, and there is no condemnation for those in Him (Romans 8:1).

Sources

1. Bent Boving, in Mechanisms Concerned with Conception, ed. C. G. Hartman (Pergamon Press, 1963), 386; symposium of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Population Council, 1959.
2. ACOG Terminology Bulletins 1965 and 1972, documented in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (2012). https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(11)02223-X/fulltext
3. R (Smeaton) v Secretary of State for Health [2002] EWHC 610 (Admin). https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2002/610.html
4. Hansard, House of Commons written answer, 19 July 2000. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2000-07-19/debates/3654034a-014e-4ccf-921b-fef2a919d49a/EmergencyContraception
5. Microgynon 30, Summary of Product Characteristics, electronic medicines compendium. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/1130/smpc
6. Mirena, Summary of Product Characteristics, electronic medicines compendium. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/1132/smpc
7. NHS, “Intrauterine device (IUD)”. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/iud-coil/
8. Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Clinical Guideline: Emergency Contraception (March 2017, amended July 2023). https://www.fsrh.org
9. IPPF International Medical Advisory Panel, Statement on Emergency Contraception. https://www.ippf.org/sites/default/files/2018-04/IMAP%20Statement%20on%20Emergency%20Contraception.pdf
10. FDA Plan B One-Step decisional memorandum (December 2022); FIGO, “Mechanism of action of levonorgestrel emergency contraception”. https://www.figo.org/mechanism-action-emergency-contraception
11. Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11. https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2015/11.html
12. Lambeth Conference 1920, Resolution 68; 1930, Resolution 15 (193–67, 46 abstaining). https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/127734/1930.pdf
13. Andrew Moeller, “Eugenics and the Approval of Birth Control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press, 2023), footnote 12. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/eugenics-and-the-approval-of-birth-control-at-the-1930-lambeth-conference

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version. Where the science is disputed we have said so rather than overstate. We would rather bring you a smaller case that holds than a larger one that does not.

Read the whole case

This article is the short explainer. The full case is set out in an open letter to church leaders, eight supporting treatises and a tract, all of which can be read on this site or downloaded as print editions: the abortifacient contraception section.