Sulmasy on Emergency Contraception

On the topic of the Connecticut bishops' decision to comply with a new state law requiring Catholic hospitals to distribute emergency contraception (Plan B, not RU-486) to rape victims without an ovulation test, a reader emailed me an article from the December 2006 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal by Daniel Sulmasy titled Emergency Contraception for Women Who Have Been Raped: Must Catholics Test for Ovulation, or Is Testing for Pregnancy Morally Sufficient?  Here is the abstract:

On the grounds that rape is an act of violence, not a natural act of intercourse, Roman Catholic teaching traditionally has permitted women who have been raped to take steps to prevent pregnancy, while consistently prohibiting abortion even in the case of rape. Recent scientific evidence that emergency contraception (EC) works primarily by preventing ovulation, not by preventing implantation or by aborting implanted embryos, has led Church authorities to permit the use of EC drugs in the setting of rape. Doubts about whether an abortifacient effect of EC drugs has been completely disproven have led to controversy within the Church about whether it is sufficient to determine that a woman is not pregnant before using EC drugs or whether one must establish that she has not recently ovulated. This article presents clinical, epidemiological, and ethical arguments why testing for pregnancy should be morally sufficient for a faith community that is strongly opposed to abortion.

From the article itself:

The real heart of this issue is the blunt fact that medical science presently has no way of determining whether a woman has conceived until the early embryo has implanted in the wall of the uterus and stimulated the production of substances that can be detected in the blood, about seven days after conception. It is this fact that causes the debate. The ovulation approach attempts (imperfectly) to eliminate any possibility that the woman might have conceived by precluding the prescription of EC drugs for any woman who might be ovulating or about to ovulate. This is a very crude approximation of what we are after. In medical jargon, it is called a “shotgun” approach—hoping to hit the target by intervening with a wide scatter. It is equivalent, for instance, to recommending that all men over the age of 50 have their prostates removed because PSA screening misses some cases of prostate cancer.