Guest Editorial: Plan B and the Morning After pills—The truth behind the UVA Health System’s lies

Plan B and the Morning After pills—The truth behind the UVA Health System’s lies
by Sean Cannan

It’s time to get real about the Morning After Pills. It’s time to get the facts straight. It’s time to start protecting the health of women and their children, and cut through all the politics and profits that allow the drug companies and their retailers to keep people in the dark.

The Plan B pills that the University gives away like candy are NOT medicine. They are a very harmful and dangerous dosage of the hormonal STEROID progestin that has already been proven in far lower dosages (birth control pills) to cause breast cancer, blood clots, cervical cancer, arterial plaque, and liver cancer. Additionally, they deplete a woman’s body of bone mass and several important nutrients.

They have also been shown in several medical studies to cause birth defects by way of a folic acid deficiency and by negatively affecting the development of male organs due to the excess of female hormones in the mother’s bloodstream before she even knows she’s pregnant. Several recent studies have directly linked early maternal progestin intake with hypospadias (a birth defect of the penis), which continues a long list of other studies which have shown female steroids to cause malformations to the testes and prostate in utero.

Keep in mind that these have been observed in the children of women who were taking single pills 40 to 50 times less potent than the huge 1.5 mg regimen of Plan B. And Plan B can remain in your system for many weeks damaging anyone who may have survived its one mechanism of action that starves and expels an embryo after conception and/or disrupts his or her implantation.

But you won’t hear one word about any of this at Elson or the Teen Center. Nor do they warn women that taking Plan B increases their chances of an ectopic pregnancy. The same people who will warn you not to have a single beer or cigarette while you think you might be pregnant nonetheless give you something far more harmful – and lie about it. Warning women of grave threats to their future health is bad for business. By the time your body tries to expel this harmful drug via vomiting, and you’re bleeding and depressed – they know you’ll keep quiet. You’ll be left to wonder for weeks if you are pregnant, and what you may have already done to your child if you are. Even if your cycle ever gets back to normal, you’ll be left to forever ponder the unanswerable question of what really happened.

Indeed, this corruption of scientific facts and medical ethics goes all the way up the politically influenced ladder to the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association. That’s how it somehow became “logical” and “ethical” that although women need to have their blood tested for clotting agents with the low dose steroids, this very important precaution is skipped altogether in the case of a dosage 50 times more powerful.

Plan B is not really that much different than RU-486 if it is working after conception. They both are early abortion pills that can and do bring a unique, tiny human life to his or her unnatural end. Passing your child into the toilet or garbage is just less noticeable. But with human rights, size doesn’t matter. If your child does survive Plan B, the University will have another quick fix for your “little” problem then, too. But they won’t inform you that surgical abortion causes preterm live births later in life – and thus countless more birth defects. That’s also bad for business.

In the end, the breast cancer providers at Elson and the Teen Center can do back flips in logic, language, and science and try to make the first few weeks of human development disappear. They can pretend that all of what the modern science of embryology has proven takes place at conception has somehow vanished. They can lie and misinform and keep both proven and plausible risks from you on behalf of the pharmaceutical and abortion industries. But they will never make human biology conform to their cruel version of human ideology. Indeed, it’s long since time that human ideology got back to conforming to human biology.

I know I’m not the ideal messenger here, but the uninformed women who suffer in silence from this human pesticide – such as my ex girlfriend in the Class of 2008 did – are not about to start coming forward to tell their stories, now are they? The embarrassed silence of their victims is what the University depends on. I encourage everyone to have a look at our facebook group “UVA Health System: Tell the Truth about Steroids, Birth Defects, and Abortions” and all the links therein. Information and medical facts cannot hurt you. But as too many have already discovered the hard way, not knowing them can.

(Editor’s note: This editorial originally was submitted to the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, which declined to publish it.)