If you go to Duramed Pharmaceuticals web site, go2planb.com and click on "Prescribing Information", you will find the following under "Clinical Pharmacology":

Emergency contraceptives are not effective if the woman is already pregnant.

So far, so good. This seems to be the gist of the recent Broadsheet postings on this topic. Continuing...

Plan B is believed to act as an emergency contraceptive principally by preventing ovulation or fertilization (by altering tubal transport of sperm and/or ova).

Notice the words "may", and "principally". In other words, if the drug company has all their facts right, the primary effect of the drug is to prevent, one way or another, sperm and ova from meeting. So what secondary effects might there be? What if the nice folks at Duramed are just flat out wrong? Oh never mind, we all know big pharma never makes mistakes.

In addition, it may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium).

Wait, what? Go back and read that again. According to the manufacturer (which wants you to buy and use their product): Plan B may prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.

It's not just Hasselbeck or some right winger saying this. This is coming from the mouth of people who would probably benefit financially if they didn't have to admit the fact.

It is not effective once the process of implantation has begun.

Again, consistent with the first sentence and the Broadsheet editorial position.

Why am I (a pro-choice liberal) bringing this up? This is not the first time Broadsheet has pulled this kind of thing. A recent posting on IUDs made the exact same mistake. (Insisting that they prevent fertilization, and not implantation, when product literature explicity states that the mfg. doesn't really know for sure how it works, and that it may work in one of several ways, including by preventing implantation.)

Furthermore, statements such as "By rights it should be the common ground in the pro-choice/pro-life debate", which again, seems to be the typical Broadsheet editorial stance, are totaly belied by the correct information. This is exactly what the split is about. Either a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a human being, in which case no argument about rights/rape/economics/autonomy/incest has any relevance whatsoever ... or, it is not ... in which case no argument is even needed.

Unfortunately, that is the one question which no objective scientific evidence can seem to be found. But attempting to engage in a debate with pro-lifers by saying that various methods of birth control do not prevent implantation of a fertilized egg is both counter factual, and just plain stupid. There may be a few "pro-lifers" who would be willing to accept the destruction of fertilized eggs prior to implantation, but they aren't the ones driving the agenda.

It's time to quit beating about the bush, and confront the issue head on.

My last letter, para 5, replace "may" with "believed". Sorry.

Aside from the many sources for BASIC that previous writers have mentioned, I'd like to know exactly what it is that Brin is looking for in BASIC that can't be done in, say, Python. Sure, the language has object oriented features, and a large standard library, but you don't have to use them. You can use 'print' and 'input' and do old style terminal programming just like the good ole days. In fact, I recently helped one of my students do exactly the sort of thing that Brin alludes to in this piece: The physics teacher had given this kid some old algorithm in basic, and I helped him re-write it in Python. The only thing that was really different was the BASIC notation for arrays vs the Python list notation. So what's the big deal?