Lies, Lies and More Lies: How Anti-Choicers Are Using ‘Personhood’ to Ban Birth Control
Here’s the story: Anti-choicers have been trying, in various states, to pass various versions of a “personhood” amendment that would define a fertilized egg as a person. They hope to sell this to the voters as nothing but a ban on abortion, but pro-choice activists who are familiar with anti-choice belief systems know that anti-choicers also hope that it can be used to ban the birth control pill. The reason we know they hope this is anti-choice activists are both hostile to contraception use and believe that the birth control pill works by stopping fertilized eggs from implanting. The problem is that the birth control simply doesn’t work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting. That’s repeated a lot, but there’s no evidence to back that assertion up. The birth control pill works by tweaking a woman’s hormones so she doesn’t ovulate. Since an estimated half of fertilized eggs slough off on their own anyway, a woman who uses no contraception will “kill” far more fertilized eggs than a woman on the pill, simply because a woman on the pill doesn’t fertilize the eggs in the first place. If you are truly weeping over the souls of the departed fertilized eggs, then you would want every woman in the world on the pill, though that effort to keep from “murdering” one-celled “persons” would effectively end our species. (Sadly, not enough people push anti-choice arguments to their logical conclusions, even though anti-choicers are extremists who really should die by the sword they live by.)
This is where the situation gets confusing and choices get hard. Because there are two separate issues at stake here: the fact that anti-choicers are trying to get the birth control pill banned and the fact that anti-choicers lie about the how the birth control pill works.