Number of abortions increased by 4000 in the UK last year

Recent US figures, and questions about contraception

Protestants rethinking contraception?

But the Romney decision and explanation open the door to talking about contraception. After all, the morning after pill is essentially just a high dose of the same hormones in normal oral contraceptives ("the pill"). Whether normal oral contraceptives work as abortifacients (that is, whether they prevent implantation as well as preventing fertilization) has been a matter of some debate. But it’s a debate that we may be about to see break open in the evangelical Protestant community.

First, we’re seeing Protestant publishers talk more about the ethics of contraception. Baker published Jenell Williams Paris’s Birth Control for Christians in 2003; now Zondervan recently released The Contraception Guidebook with the Christian Medical Associations. Neither took a hard line against the pill (The Contraception Guidebook, not surprisingly, echoes the CMA’s statement on the subject), but the fact that evangelicals are even talking about possible post-fertilization effects of hormonal birth control is significant. (Christianity Today in 2001 published differing perspectives on birth control but takes no editorial position on the pill. The next issue of Christianity Today includes an article, "Why I Kissed the Pill Goodbye.")

We’re also seeing the Protestant political and legal groups talking a lot more about birth control. They have adamantly defended of Catholic pharmacists who refused to fill birth-control prescriptions in a way that they have not defended other stances of conscience they do not themselves share. And lately, frustration about judicial activism has focused a lot less on 1973’s Roe v. Wade and a lot more on 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut, which threw out a Connecticut law banning contraceptives. (Search the websites of Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and elsewhere.)

Focus vice president for medical outreach Walter Larimore notes that the organization moved from opposing the abortifacient theory to a neutral position in 1999. (It’s unclear when Focus posted on its website a page that said, "The majority of the physicians [on the Focus on your Family’s Health advisory board] feel that the pill does not have an abortifacient effect." And it’s unclear when this article was removed from the site.)

Might evangelical Protestants move from opposing high doses of what’s in oral contraceptives to opposing oral contraceptives altogether? The jury is definitively out. But there are early signs of change. A new conception of the pill may be implanting.