Conclusion
“The overview we have provided regarding the contraceptives available today and their abortifacient properties prompts the following conclusive observations:
1) Far from reducing the number of abortions, contraception finds in abortion, so to speak, its natural unfolding. Given that the contraceptive mentality is in fact very close to the abortive mentality, large-scale use of contraception in the developed nations has contributed to the routine practise of abortion.
2) Scientific research today is geared towards the development of contraceptive techniques that are increasingly ‘efficient’ in preventing conception and the continuation of pregnancy, and that are increasingly less risky to the woman, resulting in increasingly abortifacient contraception. It strives to space the intake of abortive substances, administering them in injectable form or subcutaneously with the aim of reducing the ‘fatigue’ of daily consumption by the woman. In seeking to increase the efficiency of contraceptives and reduce their risks, pharmacological research has made contraception ever more abortifacient; suffice it to think of the new forms of low-oestrogen estro-progestogenic pills. This is a further demonstration of the close link, not only cultural but also scientific, between the use of contraception and the demand for abortion.
3) Those tempted to take the easy path of post-coital contraception in the form of oral hormones frequently do so for reasons of personal convenience, refusing a child no longer regarded as a gift, but as a nuisance, an obstacle to personal happiness, a damage. These persons must be helped to become aware of the distortion they have accepted to thereby provoke in their conscience hence in their moral life.
4) Persons who consider themselves entitled to have recourse to contraception for medical, psychological, social or economic reasons that they would be ready to defend before a third party and before God, and who feel justified on the grounds that they are in fact avoiding an abortion to which they would have to resort in the absence of contraception, should be aware of the fact that they will, at one moment or another in their contraceptive life, destroy an embryo that has formed in them either because they have forgotten to take the pill or because the pill has been inefficient, or because their IUD has moved. They might reject abortion in its voluntary, surgical or chemical form, but without realizing it they will commit one or several abortions at one point or another in their contraceptive life. Their action will be objectively the same as an abortion termed ‘surgical’, with the difference that they will not realize this and will not see the results of their abortion. There is no ‘right to ignorance’ in this area. By the same token, pastors, theologians and spiritual advisers who, verbally or in writing, endorse the use of contraception, must know that, in so doing, they are endorsing all the abortions caused and to be caused by contraception, which amounts to millions of individuals.
5) Today there is nothing heroic, exceptional or naive in resorting, within the framework of responsible parenthood, to ‘natural’ methods of controlling female fertility, whose scientific basis, efficiency and benefits to couples in terms of deeper conjugal communion, are well known. This is why it is necessary for a husband and wife to exercise their responsibility in this area by acquiring training in these methods. Persons advising these couples – doctors, social workers, priests, and male and female religious – should consider it their moral duty to promote and facilitate access to these natural methods.
6) Turning to so-called ‘menstrual regulation’ by mifepristone, the famous abortion pill RU 486 promoted by Prof. Etienne Emile Baulieu, the line between contraception and abortion, already blurred in the case of oral contraceptives, disappears altogether. The product of the most recent research on oral contraception, RU486 provides objective evidence of the link between contraception and abortion”.