Women should be offered an after-sex contraceptive pill that could prevent pregnancy up to a month later, say researchers.
They
are urging drug companies to develop a version of the Pill that would
disrupt a pregnancy after the egg and sperm had joined to create an
embryo.
But campaigners say
this pill would effectively be ‘abortion by the back-door’ - by the time
a woman takes it the foetus may have developed tiny organs and limbs.
Academics
from New York and Sweden argue that an after-sex pill that only needed
to be taken once a month could prove very popular amongst women.
They
may only need to take it a few times a year depending on how often they
had unprotected sex and it would require less planning, they say.
Around 3.5 million British women currently take a version of the Pill which contains hormones to prevent the release of the egg.
But
many suffer side effects including weight gain, headaches, nausea and
more seriously it can increase the risk of blood clots and breast
cancer.
Dr Elizabeth
Raymond, from the New York-based technology firm Gynuity, and colleagues
from the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, say an
after-sex pill would be widely accepted by women - even if it was
considered a form of abortion.
It
could be taken at the end of every month and would be so powerful it
could prevent a pregnancy that resulted from sex nearly four weeks
earlier.
Writing in the Journal of
Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, they add: ‘Twenty years
ago, a multicountry survey specifically designed to investigate women’s
feelings about a post-fertilisation contraceptive pill found remarkably
high acceptance.
‘We have no evidence that women have changed since then; it is the current political environment that needs refocusing.’
Dr
Raymond added: ‘We need to stop extolling pre-fertilisation
contraception as a good thing, because it implies that something that
works after fertilisation is bad. We have to stop doing that.’
To meet the challenges of our
increasingly complicated world, women deserve all possible options for
controlling and preserving their reproductive health and lives.’
But
Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust, said: ‘What these
researchers are calling for is nothing less than the routine provision
of an abortion pill to women.
‘The licensing of this kind of drug would effectively introduce abortion on demand by the back door.’
‘To
call a drug a contraceptive when it is designed and intended to be used
after intercourse and potentially after fertilisation is a complete
misnomer. There is no such thing as an ‘after-sex contraceptive pill’.
It is a contradiction in terms.
‘In
their zeal to increase choices for women, the researchers have lost
sight of the other person who is involved in every abortion no matter
how early a pregnancy is ended.
‘An abortion always means the total removal of any choice from the unborn child.’
dailymail.co.uk
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