Why the IUD is an abortifacient

The intrauterine device (IUD) is a fairly popular form of birth control that is inserted into a woman’s uterus. What many contracepting pro-life women don’t realize, is that the IUD is an abortifacient. It also poses health risks to the woman using the IUD.

Planned Parenthood’s website downplays these risks:

“Some people have side effects that bother them after getting an IUD, but these usually go away after a few months. Rarely, the side effects can be serious.”

Tell that to Tanai Smith, of Baltimore, Md. According to a report by Fox News, “her IUD forced its way up into her stomach and migrated over to her liver.” The complications were profound, causing her to lose her ovaries, uterus, and toes.

IUD risks to women

Ms. Smith’s medical disaster was clearly an unusual reaction to use of an IUD. More common risks include a chance of perforating the uterine lining when an IUD is inserted. Perforations occur once or twice per one-thousand women.

When conception occurs in a woman with an IUD, the chance of an ectopic pregnancy is 6 percent.

Most common of all, an IUD increases a woman’s risk of an infection in her uterus. This occurs in about one out of a hundred women in the first twenty days of insertion. According to Dr. Ben Janaway writing in “The Femedic” blog,

“Untreated infections can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. One episode of untreated pelvic inflammatory disease carries a 12% risk of infertility, whereas three untreated episodes carry a 50% risk.”

Contracepting women using IUDs must be alert to these real health risks. Even more, they need to be alert to the way IUDs work, because an IUD is an abortifacient.

Why the IUD is an abortifacient

According to Maggie DeWitte, Executive Director of Iowans for LIFE,

“IUD’s are 100% abortifacient in that they work to thin the lining of the uterus so that the newly formed baby cannot implant and therefore dies. Unlike oral contraceptions that work in one of three ways (by preventing ovulation, thickening the mucus to prevent sperm from entering, and thinning the lining so the baby cannot attach to the uterus), IUDs work only one way: ending the life of a newly formed baby.”

IFL’s Women’s Reproductive Health Resource Book provides additional background:

FERTILIZATION is when a unique human life begins. This ‘conception’ process begins when a sperm penetrates an oocyte, creating a brand new human life.

A unique human person is now created, as highly regarded textbooks on embryology state:

Life begins “when the sperm and ovum, neither of which can sustain life or direct growth by itself, come together at fertilization. For the first time the new life has all 46 chromosomes and all the directions (DNA) it needs for the rest of life. The sex of the baby, the color of the hair, everything is already fixed.

Cells begin replicating at a dizzying pace, and human organs develop. And then the next step occurs:

IMPLANTATION is the attachment process of the now 5 to 7 day old baby to the lining of his/her mother’s uterus.

IUDs prevent this new, one-of-a-kind human being from implanting on the mother’s uterus, which aborts her child.

Scientifically speaking, this is an abortion.

Philosophically speaking, abortion is immoral.

As Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, asserts in the video above,

“Everyone can agree that it is always morally wrong to deliberately kill an innocent person.”

What many women don’t fully realize is that is exactly what an IUD does, deliberately kill an innocent human being. Watch the video above for the philosophical case against abortion.

Many contracepting pro-life women just don’t realize the implications of what they are doing when they use an IUD: the IUD is an abortifacient.

[For more info on women’s reproductive health, call for a free copy of our Women’s Reproductive Health Resource Book at 515- 255-4113 or download a copy today.]

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2 Comments

  1. […] majorities have passed—all of them. Groups like Iowans for Life want to go further and ban highly effective birth control methods, like IUDs, as abortifacients. Texas is going after medicated abortion (over 50 percent of 2020 […]



  2. […] is correct. Anti-abortion activists do argue that IUDs are an abortifacient, and Hobby Lobby argued that point in a Supreme Court case […]