For a long time, I believed that both standard hormonal contraception and post-sex "emergency contraception" acted both by preventing fertilization and by preventing implantation of fertilized eggs. I assume that most people, provided they have beliefs about this at all, also think this. (Here we see a Findlaw column by a law professor--an expert, it seems, on abortion and privacy law--about pharmacists and EC that takes this as given.) And yet apparently it's not exactly true.

Via Bitch, PhD., a 2004 survey article saying that one variant of EC, Levonorgestrel, does not seem to affect fertilized eggs:

The ‘window of effect’ for levonorgestrel seems to be rather narrow. It begins after selection of the dominant follicle, but before LH begins to rise. Levonorgestrel does not affect endometrial development or steroid receptor expression in the Fallopian tube. Animal studies confirm that levonorgestrel acts to block or delay ovulation but does not affect fertilization or implantation (Müller et al., 2003).

One interesting thing here, to my mind, is simply that scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how all this stuff works. I sort of assumed that, since hormonal contraception had been around for decades, scientists knew everything about it. Guess not: "If the effect of EC is mainly to block the LH surge or to interfere with other processes involved in ovulation, is not clear and needs to be further studied."

The other thing, of course, is that this seems like a rather Big Deal, substantively speaking. If at least -one- form of EC doesn't inhibit implantation, why isn't this being publicized heavily? It would seem to completely undercut most of the opposition to allowing wider use of EC, though those opposed to hormonal contraception in general would of course not be mollified. I suppose I can see some worry about the residual uncertainty--maybe someone will discover in a few years that, oops, levonorgestrel actually does occasionally inhibit implantation. But that sort of residual uncertainty is kind of ineradicable, really.

One could, I suppose, push this harder in terms of consistency: given that there is no fertilized egg for most women who seek EC (especially if they get it!), the pharmacist who dispenses it is really only has a F x A chance of participating at all in a fertilized egg's destruction, where F is the likelihood there is (or will be) a fertilized egg and and A is the (apparently very very tiny, if at all different from zero) likelihood of EC stopping implantation. But that same F x A calculus applies to a pharmacist or any salesperson selling almost anything to a woman (she could have just had unprotected sex!). After all, there aren't many things that we are -more certain- have 0 impact on post-fertilization implanation than we are about levonorgestrel. Can one draw the line in a principled way?

And that's even without the obvious point that every time EC stops the fertilization of an egg that, if fertilized, would be brought to conception, it has -reduced- the number of abortions by one.

So why isn't this being made more clear? I'd chalk it up to my ignorance, but I've seen that "EC stops implantation" line lots of places; even BPhD. thought so, and the law professor linked to above. Why aren't more people focusing on levonorgestrel, say, as the "good EC"?

Last year in procedure I remember thinking that it ought to be easy to get around the federal courts' Constitutional standing rules. Why couldn't the would-be ideological plaintiff just make a bet whose outcome depended on a question of federal law? If the bet was a legally binding contract, then real injury (the payment of money) would rest on the way the law came down. (Similarly, an ideological philanthropist could endow a trust to do the same thing-- it would pay out, say, 50 dollars every time any litigant got an instance of logging declared illegal under some administrative law rule.)

To be sure, the Court would find some excuse to pierce this ruse, although it might force the Court to be clearer about what's going on in constitutional standing cases. (Are the limits on citizen-suit provisions Article III restrictions, as the Court says, or Article I restrictions, as Justice Scalia once said from his academic hat?)

At any rate, I learned today that I have been beaten to the punch. Apparently this is exactly the legal trick that was used in England to allow chancery (which had no juries) to get jury verdicts. See 3 Blackstone, Commentaries 452-53:

(T)he plaintiff by a fiction declares that he laid a wager of 5 pounds with the defendant, that A was heir at law to B; and then avers that he is so; and therefore demands the 5 pounds. The defendant admits the feigned wager, but avers that A is not the heir to B; and therefore upon that issue is joined, which is directed out of chancery to be tried: and thus the verdict of the jurors at law determines the fact in the court of equity.

In response to my brief post earlier about street safety in New Haven, I received word from several readers that they are shocked to see me betraying my libertarian roots. Subsidies! Of course, it is not clear what is un-libertarian about subsidizing safety. The basic premise of the night-watchman state is that it will subsidize the weak who would otherwise be clobbered by the strong. Whether this is done by putting private eyes-on-the-street or full-time police officers in patrol cars is surely just a question of efficacy.

Always quibbling, PG suggests it would make more sense to simply subsidize places that are open late. I suspect that this is insufficient for a few reasons. First of all, my understanding is that Yale already does this in the few commercial regions it can afford. Second of all, it fails to address the problem in the vast swathes of basically residential housing in both my neighborhood and the whiter "grad-school-ghetto". Even if one were going to subsidize late-night businesses, it probably wouldn't be here. Third, I am dubious about the efficacy of supply-side subsidies here. We need to know more about the relevant elasticities and demand curves, but I suspect you'd get far more street-traffic for the buck if you paid the street-traffic rather than its destinations.

Finally, in case it was unclear, the subsidy program suggested was in fact tongue-in-cheek. I am skeptical of government attempts to internalize externalities in this way. A median proposal between libertarianism and PG's would be to eliminate all residential zoning restrictions on businesses willing to be open late so long as they had small parking lots and to keep her suggestion to automatically license all street vendors at night. This proposal is also tongue-in-cheek, but less so.