For example, conventional wisdom in the West is that the birth-control pill was an essential step toward women's liberation.

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But the preparation he was using was then reformulated as the birth-control pill.

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It is not only a series of popes but also a number of prominent secular thinkers who believe that the birth-control pill has been one of the major milestones in human history a diverse group that runs from public intellectuals of a previous generation like Walter Lippmann to such contemporary scholars as Francis Fukuyama and Robert Putnam.

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This move comes just weeks after a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, ordered the FDA to make the morning-after birth control pill available to women of any age, without a prescription.

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Last summer the health department decreed that all new health-insurance policies should cover birth-control services for women, including the morning-after pill (which most pro-lifers consider a form of abortion) and sterilisation.

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Evangelicals generally permit the use of birth control, but they object to specific methods such as the morning-after contraceptive pill, which they argue is tantamount to abortion.

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She suggested women who had completed their families should consider a permanent form of birth control such as sterilisation, and those who still wanted to have a family considered using a back-up form of birth control, such as a condom, as well as the Pill.

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The morning-after pill contains a higher dose of the female progestin hormone than is in regular birth control pills.

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