Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- It's impossible for me to know how many abortions I've had. If asked last week, I would have confidently declared, none.

Now, I don't know. It depends on what the meaning of the word ``abortion'' is.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has drafted a rule that would call it abortion when a contraceptive prevents a fertilized egg from embedding itself in the uterine wall.

That's one of the ways many birth-control pills and intrauterine devices work. And if that's abortion, millions of women who didn't know they were pregnant -- who medically weren't pregnant -- have killed their unborn children.

No joke.

Folks within the federal health bureaucracy have drafted a rule that would give ``human being in utero'' status to the itty bitty zygote.

Not quite half as big as a grain of salt, the zygote is the cluster of cells formed after sperm penetrates egg. It travels toward the uterus and either keeps going, leaving the woman's body, or attaches itself to her uterine wall some five to 10 days after fertilization.

If it latches on, the zygote becomes an embryo. Eight weeks later the embryo becomes a fetus and, eventually, a baby.

A woman isn't pregnant until the zygote lodges, according to well-established, standard medical definitions. Only then does she start producing pregnancy hormones. Pregnancy tests register negative if taken before that.

Waiting Game

Anti-abortionists are pushing the notion that pregnancy begins with fertilization, not implantation. They want validation for that fringe viewpoint from a federal agency that, with a straight face, still calls itself the Department of Health and Human Services.

Even the most famous of anti-abortion laws, the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions, allows it for ``drugs or devices to prevent implantation of the fertilized ovum.''

How quaint.

Why call contraception abortion? It's not as if anti- abortionists can stop either one of them.

But while waiting for the Supreme Court to strike down Roe v. Wade, they've been persuading state legislatures and Congress to restrict abortions in every imaginable way, making it as difficult as possible for women to get them.

Now they want to make it just as hard to get contraception.

Contraception as most women practice it is part of the ``culture of death,'' declared Susan Orr, whom President George W. Bush put in charge of the Office of Population Affairs.

Protecting Zygotes

You might think that if your aim is to keep abortions down, you would make birth control readily accessible. But this crowd is as eager to protect the zygote as they are the late-term fetus.

So they drafted this rule, ostensibly to carry out laws that forbid discrimination against doctors and other health-care workers who don't want to participate in abortion. If the rule goes into effect, they wouldn't have to participate in contraception either.

The result could be profound. Rape victims might not get emergency contraception, even in states that require health professionals to make it available.

Poor women who rely on federal programs for birth control might be turned away at the door.

Pharmacists could refuse to dispense contraception to single people because they morally oppose sex outside marriage, or to anyone on the belief they would be assisting abortion.

Arm Twisting

The draft says without irony that its aim is to keep federal funds from paying for ``morally coercive or discriminatory practices.''

And yet, the rule would let health professionals morally coerce patients who don't share their religious beliefs.

The rule would allow ``institutions and private health-care providers to decide that they will withhold essential health care treatment for women because of their own moral beliefs, not because of the medical considerations involved,'' says Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center in Washington.

Any entity that violates the rule might lose all federal funding, including money already disbursed, plus pay more penalties if found to have committed fraud.

The rule is in an embryonic, ``pre-decisional'' stage not ready for public review, as the warning on the bottom of each page of the draft says.

After declining to discuss it earlier in the week, an HHS spokeswoman today said the leaked draft doesn't reflect HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt's intent. On a blog item posted last night, he said he never meant to equate contraception with abortion.

The item follows weeks of angry reaction to the leaked document.

On the Warpath

It's ``an affront to health professionals and American women,'' Douglas Kirkpatrick, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a letter to HHS

The American Medical Association wrote a letter to Leavitt complaining of the rule. So did 28 U.S. senators, who called the proposal ``utterly irresponsible.''

And 57 health care, religious, women's and pro-choice groups wrote Leavitt to say the rule would rewrite existing law and preempt multiple state laws.

The Bush administration has been on the warpath against abortion and contraception for years.

This latest effort, calling birth control abortion and a zygote a human being, makes clear how radical are its views, and how dangerous.

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg news columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 8, 2008 12:23 EDT