By Rita Diller
From its earliest days, the development, research, and promotion of the pill were built on lies. The lies continue today. Women are irreparably harmed by those lies. Children are killed by those lies. Families are ripped apart by those lies. And society hangs in the balance because America has not been told the truth. As American Life League gears up for our 2015 Pill Kills National Day of Action on June 6, we will shed light on the lies that surround the pill and the resultant contraceptive culture—and we will expose the truth. Here are four ways that the pill kills truth.
1. Researchers lied about the purpose of the initial studies and gave the pill to mental patients without direct consent. When human trials of the pill began in 1954, Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock undertook a birth control study funded by Planned Parenthood. They lied and claimed that the study was about infertility. Fifty female infertility patients volunteered for the study, but the pill was also given to 12 female and 16 male psychiatric patients without their direct consent.
2. Researchers ignored the truth about side effects and didn’t investigate the cause of women’s deaths. To gain FDA approval, large-scale human clinical trials of the pill began in 1956. Dr. Pincus chose Puerto Rico for the trials because of the large pool of poor, uneducated women available to him there. Even though the local doctor in charge of the study told Pincus that the pill causes “too many side reactions to be generally acceptable,” he ignored the warning and carried on the studies without investigating side effects. Three women died during those trials. The cause of their deaths was never investigated.
3. The pill was approved as a contraceptive with no warning about dangerous side effects. Women were lied to when facts were omitted. In 1960, even though the FDA had initially questioned the pill’s long-term safety, those concerns were buried. The FDA approved the sale of the pill as a contraceptive with no warning about the side effects. It became the first FDA-approved drug to be given to healthy patients for long-term use and for social purposes. Medicine was no longer strictly a healing art. It was perverted by the use of drugs to deter, damage, and even destroy healthy female reproductive systems.
4. ACOG changed the scientific, long-held definition of pregnancy to sidestep the reality of pre-implantation abortions. In the early 1960s, the pill and IUD were on the market. Scientists knew that they worked all or some of the time by preventing implantation of an already-conceived child.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists pulled off one of the biggest and most damaging lies in the history of birth control when it arbitrarily changed the definition of pregnancy in order to sidestep the reality that contraceptives can cause pre-implantation abortions.
It is a basic fact of biology that, in sexual reproduction, a unique human being is created at the moment that sperm penetrates an ovum. ACOG changed the definition of pregnancy from that moment of creation to the time of implantation in its very first terminology bulletin in September 1965 to accommodate pre-implantation abortions caused by contraceptives. That enables proponents of the pill and other abortifacient birth control to untruthfully claim that it does not cause abortions.
The lies and obfuscation have continued to grow as Planned Parenthood has used contraception as its rallying cry for its supposed war on women, and has literally forced religious institutions and businesses to give up their freedoms and kowtow to the contraceptive mandate.
Read the Wednesday STOPP Report for continuing coverage about how the pill kills truth. And be sure to save the date—Saturday, June 6. Plan to go to Planned Parenthood that day. Bring The Pill Kills signs and literature to educate your community about the perils of the pill and the lies and obfuscation that the contraceptive culture is built upon. Join us on Facebook to be a part of the ongoing conversation!
Rita Diller directs American Life League’s The Pill Kills program.
