Contraception: Why Not? (part 8)

This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith.

Slide: Contraceptives as Abortifacients

Many people don’t know that the chemical contraceptives in and of themselves are abortifacients.  What does that mean?

The pill, Norplant, Depo-Provera, and the patch, are chemical contraceptives.  They put in a woman’s body synthetic forms of the hormones that she has when she’s pregnant.  A woman who is using a chemical contraceptive is in a state of pseudo-pregnancy.  Her body “thinks” it’s pregnant.  Women don’t ovulate when they’re pregnant.  There’s no point in ovulation if a woman is already pregnant.

The body is designed to get pregnant.  Month after month a woman’s body functions in such a way as to accommodate a pregnancy.   A pregnant woman produces hormones that are going to gestate and nurture the embryo within her rather than to create a new human being.  In the insert that comes with the pill or any one of the chemical contraceptives, it is first called an “anovulant” because it stops a woman from ovulating.  If there’s no egg there, if a woman does not ovulate, she cannot possibly get pregnant.

Sometimes women who use contraceptives ovulate anyway.  A healthy woman wants to ovulate.  That’s what her body is designed to do.  She has a little war going on in her body if she’s not really pregnant and she is using a chemical contraceptive.  Her body is trying to produce the hormones that cause ovulation but the synthetic hormones are trying to suppress production of those hormones.  Sometimes a woman’s own natural hormones win out.  If a woman doesn’t take the pill the same time every day or if she’s taking other medicine that might interfere with the hormones, she might produce her own fertile hormones.  Some 2-10 percent of the time a woman who is taking the pill ovulates.  The ovulation rate is even higher with Norplant and Depo-Provera, possibly as high as 40-60 percent of the time.  A woman who is using those is still ovulating, but she’s not getting pregnant.  Why is she not getting pregnant?  It may be because the fertile mucus is not there to help carry the sperm to meet the egg.

That is, chemical contraceptives work by “changing the viscosity of the mucus.”  The same hormones that help a woman ovulate also cause her to produce a certain kind of mucus, called fertile mucus, that helps carry the sperm to the egg.  The mucus that is affected by chemical contraceptives is not as efficient in carrying sperm to meet the egg.

Sadly, a woman using a chemical contraceptive may be getting pregnant but self-aborting.  As I mentioned, sometimes a woman woman’s own hormones override the hormones in the chemical contraceptive; she ovulates and produces enough fertile mucus so that sperm does get carried to fertilize the egg.   Now there is a new little embryo, a new little human being.  That embryo tries to travel down the fallopian tube and implant in its mother’s uterine wall.  But the mother may not be able to sustain the pregnancy because she is not producing the progesterone necessary to sustain implantation.  The same cluster of hormones that cause a woman to ovulate and produce fertile mucus are the same hormones that help her build up the endometrium wall, where the new little human being is going to implant.  Yet, because the woman has been repressing her natural hormones, her endometrium is thinner than it ought to be.  She doesn’t have the full production of the hormones that will produce a nice rich endometrium wall.  So instead of implanting a new little human being, it is sloughed off.  The pharmaceutical inserts for chemical contraceptives speak of them “preventing the nidation of the fertilized ovum”.  “Nidation” means “nesting.”  Chemical contraceptives prevent the fertilized ovum, the new little human being, from nesting in the uterine wall.

Most women taking a chemical contraceptive month after month, don’t know how many times in any given year, in any given couple of years, they may in fact be conceiving, Although they conceive, they will not be gestating their child because it will not implant.

Share on Facebook