Emergency contraception policy: how moral commitments affect risk evaluation

Emergency contraception: unresolved clinical, ethical and legal quandaries still linger

“…Conscientious objection is often grounded in the belief that fertilization marks the beginning of pregnancy, and human life has equal moral value irrespective of its form or development stage. Often, Catholic hospitals and facilities are not allowed to provide EC even to rape victims, if any possibility exists that a woman may have got pregnant as a result of the sexual assault 38 . Therefore, the ethical debate on this issue centers on whether a pregnancy begins at fertilization or at a later stage of the reproductive timetable, with potentially serious implications.…”

Catholic Hospitals Should Permit Physicians to Provide Emergency Contraception to Rape Victims as an Act of Conscientious Provision

“…A less demanding interpretation of “appropriate testing” includes a simple menstrual history and a pregnancy test, termed the “pregnancy approach” by Ron Hamel and Michael Panicola (Hamel and Panicola 2002). Proponents of the pregnancy approach rely upon a method of moral reasoning based on probability, aptly called probabilism, originally developed within the Catholic Church to provide priest confessors a way to reason about the moral permissibility of a penitent’s act when the pertinent empirical or moral questions could only be answered with probability estimates, not with certainty (Satkoske and Parker 2010). In the case of prescribing LNG for rape victims, a Catholic bishop may use probabilism to conclude that, following the current research on the mechanism of action, there is moral certainty that the medication works as a contraceptive, not an abortifacient.…”