I Did Not Know That, OB/GYN Edition

Following a link recently, I came across a New York Times article from over a year ago about the morning-after pill. I learned you have one chance in forty of getting pregnant after unprotected sex if you use the morning-after pill, compared to one chance in twenty without. Maybe everybody knew this already,  but once I did a little math, there were a couple of implications that I found startling:

• The morning-after pill only cuts your chances of becoming pregnant in half, which is not all that reassuring. Half of the people who would have gotten pregnant will get pregnant anyway. 

• Without the morning-after pill, you would need to have unprotected sex thirteen times to have a fifty percent chance of getting pregnant.

If I were the father of a teenage girl, I'd want her to know the first but not the second.

Note on Contraception

You've probably heard about the brouhaha and hoo-hah that followed the decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to require religiously-affiliated employers (but not churches) to cover contraception in the health insurance it offers to employees. The Catholic Church, as you might expect, is quite exercised about this; in fact, the bishops sent out a letter to be read at Mass denouncing it.

Without getting into a long discussion, let me just make a secondary point. It is simply incorrect to say, as right-wingers have been doing, that the "morning-after pill" is an "abortion pill". The morning-after pill works by the same mechanism as conventional birth-control pills. It prevents ovulation and fertilization. It may also prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. If you, like the Catholic Church, regard a fertilized egg as a fetus, then you could call it an "abortion-inducing drug" as the bishops' letter did, but only if you're willing to make the same statement about ordinary birth-control pills.  (The bishops' letter doesn't specify which drugs they're talking about.) The bishops are doubtless willing to say that birth-control pills should be illegal; is Rick Santorum?

And I know this isn't relevant to the moral and constitutional issues, but I do wish the journalist had asked that outraged Catholic woman that I saw on TV this question: "Studies say 98 percent of Catholic women have at some time used a method of birth control other than natural family planning. Are you among the 98 percent or the 2 percent?"

BTW, I've sent an e-mail to the public information office at the Archdiocese of Boston asking for some clarifications about the bishops' letter. They warn that they don't have time to answer all mail, and so far they haven't answered mine.