Preventing and terminating pregnancies via modern science is soooo cool right now that I can hardly tell the difference between names of supermodels and abortifacients.

Ella? Yaz? Seasonique, Jolessa and Lybrel? I don’t know if they need a reality show or a prescription? (Either way I’m sure they’d be difficult to swallow.) But it shows that birth control is not about science. It’s public relations.

There’s been a media kerfuffle over FDA’s pending approval of Ella, a pill that promises to avoid pregnancy even five days after sex. In so many of the articles I’ve read pro-lifers point out that birth control pills like Ella cause abortions but the drug companies insist they do not. The media idiotically reports the he said/she said of it but rarely gets to the heart of the matter. The drug companies define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, not at conception. If you question who is right, ask them what it is that’s being implanted in the uterine wall.

But the media seems to like having Christians argue with doctors because they think it makes the Christians look bad. It furthers the motif of Christians being anti-science. Some have actually raised the specter of the separation of Church and state but that has nothing to do with it. Pro-lifers are arguing science while Big Pharma and the FDA is talking semantics and putting supermodels in birth control commercials promising freedom from mood swings, acne, irritability if only they’ll take birth control. Sadly, our culture is siding with the supermodels.