Hi Bee. It's not clear to me why you consider Dr. Myer's site to be more credible than emedicine.com or the ACOG. It certainly goes against my instincts as a webuser to put more confidence in an individual's blog than in the work of multiple researchers (i.e., emedicine.com) or in statements by a medical association (i.e, the ACOG). If the larger and more "established" sites are more thorough in listing the different possible effects of a drug or therapy, it's a cheap shot to dismiss this thoroughness as just ass-covering - isn't it just as likely that the higher thoroughness reflects a higher degree of accountability to the public and the health care community?

As for the difference between contraceptive and contra-implantation: Katlaughing and Jack the Sailor ask why it even matters, and Bee suggests that discussing it is detrimental to women's access to reproductive choices. Although I don't personally believe that the difference between contraception and contraimplantation is ethically significant, I do think there are two good reasons to be conscious of the difference:

1. Promoting individual reproductive choices: rightly or wrongly, some women do believe that life begins at conception and would not knowingly choose a birth control method that prevents implantation. If you prescribe an IUD or postcoital birth control to a woman without letting her know that one of the ways these methods work is by preventing implantation, then you're denying her the opportunity to make an informed choice.

2. Defending reproductive choices in the public forum: it is broadly accepted that some birth control methods sometimes work by preventing implantation. That doesn't mean it's an absolute truth - maybe the consensus will change in the future with new evidence - but right now, that is the consensus. If we deny or ignore that, it makes us look ignorant or deceptive, and the anti-abortion advocates can validly point that out. The debate should be about ethics and the place of religion in law, not about the physiology.

Marion (who recognizes the diagram in Dr. Myer's blog from one of my textbooks)