Pill sparks ethical questions.

Jerry Zurek

As I sit at my desk and check my email one Thursday afternoon I come across my next assignment for the Loquitur. I am to write an article regarding the morning-after-pill and let the whole campus know if I think it should be an over the counter drug. My mind quickly remembers the many times I have heard the things to never discuss over family dinner. Religion, politics and abortion, lucky for me I’m not at a table with a fork in my hand.

Before I really took a stand on the pill itself I thought I should really understand just what the pill was about. The morning-after-pill is often called the emergency contraceptive and can be taken up to 72 hours after intercourse. It is not 100 percent effective but is said to fail only 10 percent of the time so you do the math. The pill does provoke many side effects such as headaches, stomach pain and dizziness.

The morning-after-pill does a little more than Tylenol. It works initially by preventing a woman’s ovaries from releasing an egg, and by affecting the womb lining, so that a fertilized egg couldn’t attach itself there and begin to form a fetus.

Myself along with my fellow peers have grown up in a world of instant gratification, if we want something we can have it within a matter of minutes. Waiting is not in our vocabulary and it would make perfect sense for the morning-after-pill to be as attainable as Tylenol at your local CVS but in my eyes we are also a careless generation and allowing the pill to be available over the counter would do nothing more but promote this sad fact.

Being a woman I believe strongly that we have the right to decide what we do with our minds and bodies but we also have the right to make conscious knowledgeable decisions. I myself am a catholic and having gone to catholic school all of my life I believe in making moral decisions and the morning-after-pill is anything but that. My politically correct side doesn’t want to directly call it abortion by mouth but as I really think about the pill, its purpose and the reason for consumption it does fit the description.

Posted to the web by Brian Coary