060696 Contraceptive pill fails leading to killing of unborn child 




ASSOCIATED PRESS

More than half of the 1.3 million annual abortions in the United States are for women who say they or their partners had been using contraceptives, a scientific panel said May 28.

And despite a contraception revolution that started with development of the pill in the 1960s, there are more than 3 million unintended pregnancies in the United States each year, according to an Institute of Medicine report released May 28, which used 1991 statistics from the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

"There are many millions of individuals whose needs for contraception remain unmet," said Dr. Allan Rosenfield, a Columbia University professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and chairman of the committee that did the study.

The Guttmacher statistics do not provide detailed information about why the use of contraceptives failed in those instances.

Mr. Rosenfield noted that some new methods of contraception have been dropped -by pharmaceutical companies as the result of lawsuits or political pressures. That discourages new research, he said, most of which in recent years has dealt with modifying current hormone-based methods and not on developing promising new ideas.

"The political heat is such that the industry doesn't like the publicity attached to it," he said.

. Some aspects of contraceptive technology, such as use of the French pill RU486 "are controversial in our society," said Mr. Rosenfield, and companies are reluctant to make the huge investment to develop new products that might have such problems.

Washington

Defining the left

Here are a few more ways to tell if you're a liberal (see "You know you're a liberal if May 5 edition). You might be a liberal if

0 You say "extremist" in place of four-letter words.

0 You call raising Medicare spending at twice the rate of inflation a "cut!" but think capital gains that don't keep up with inflation should be taxed.

9 You think CEOs should be taxed at a higher rate than Madonna.

9 You think people who want to keep
unborn babies in one piece are "divisive. "

9 You think a group that owns a chain of abortion clinics should write the school sex education curriculum.

David Anderson
Bellevue, Washington