The Health Canada regulation changes that have now made the drug levonorgestrel, known as Plan B or the morning-after pill (MAP), available without a doctor's prescription generated a predictable flurry of sound bites. There I was on the CTV national news saying, "Taking these pills is like shooting bullets through a closed door," followed by a woman from Planned Parenthood saying, "Physicians for Life and Pharmacists for Life are just basically anti-choice." That was about seven seconds for each side.

The five-minute version of my position is that many promoters of the MAP have fallen short of some basic truth-in-advertising standards. They claim their drug blocks uterine implantation of an egg, rather than a very small human being containing fully 46 chromosomes in each of its hundreds of cells. Yet never in the history of human biology has "an egg implanted in the uterus," to quote the same distressing misinformation in a patient's guide published by no less than the Canadian Pharmacists Association.

Henry Morgentaler used to call an unborn child with fingers and toes a "blob of tissue" because it was only 10 weeks from conception and he wanted to abort it -- and it was going to look like that anyway when he was finished with it. Now we have Planned Parenthood, an organization that refuses to admit that there are little people out there inside those pregnant tummies, and that claims we are "anti-choice" if we object to an intentional hormonal assault on an "egg."

I think the defining human task of the next century will be to recognize the humanity of even the smallest homo sapiens from the moment of conception. That will mean resisting the temptation to declare open season on the embryo before implantation or in the test tube.

The horrors committed by the Nazis required prior decades of respectable academic promotion of the idea of lives of different value. Their criteria were race and fitness, ours are size and wantedness. Their ideals can be seen in the words of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger: "The Jewish people and Italian families who are filling the insane asylums ... these are the ones the taxpayers have to pay for the upkeep of ... the enormous expense of the state is increasing because of the multiplication of the unfit."

Our ideals focus on sexual freedom and personal health. Through these many decades, the fatal flaw endures: the implicit idea that we can declare some people to be less than human persons and go on to prosper, indeed that this declaration is the very key to our future prosperity. It is a flaw that will once again produce terrible consequences.

Will Johnston is a family physician from Vancouver and president of Canadian Physicians for Life. This article first appeared as a letter to the editor in the National Post on April 26, 2005. Reprinted with permission.