Disgusting tale of woman's unsucessful search for emergency contraception

The BBQ Pit
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[QUOTE=nyctea scandiaca]
treis: Ooops, sorry, you were talking about the woman in the Post article…

What she was trying to say is that it’s the attitude of people like Bush… these fundamentalist types who think their archaic religious beliefs give them the right to restrict our reproductive freedom.

Her point was, if EC was more easily accessible, she would have been able to get it when she needed it. And then she wouldn’t have had to have an abortion.
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And it shouldn’t matter if someone was using birth control or not-the fact is, doctors shouldn’t make women go through the ringer and feel like sluts to get access to legal medical care in this country.

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Guin: " I stopped my search at about 100 miles from my home because my telephone book wouldn’t take me out any further than that."

Hence the “100 miles”.

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Oh and treis…

What options did she really have? You can’t just call an OB/GYN out of the phone book and expect to be seen immediately, especially as a new patient. Believe me, as a woman, I know how long it takes to get an appointment with my doctor - weeks. And if you’re not already an existing patient, it’s going to take you even longer.

That is why there has been a push for allowing pharmacists to prescribe EC. Because they are open on weekends and later hours, and you don’t need an appointment. Those things are key since it is emergency contraception and time is of the essence.

Women shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to access EC. There is no logical reason I can think of to make EC so hard to get. It’s not dangerous and there is no potential for abuse or diversion.

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Hell, totally forgot I was on page 1 with that comment. My bad.

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[QUOTE=nyctea scandiaca]

What options did she really have? You can’t just call an OB/GYN out of the phone book and expect to be seen immediately, especially as a new patient. Believe me, as a woman, I know how long it takes to get an appointment with my doctor - weeks. And if you’re not already an existing patient, it’s going to take you even longer.

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You don’t think she could have gotten one OB/GYN to see her in all of D.C. within 72 hours? I sure as hell think she could. Regardless, she should have tried a hell of a lot harder. Blaming Bush is a simple cop-out for her gross lack of responsibilty. If you don’t want to get pregnant you don’t have sex without protection, and you sure as hell don’t say “well I am 42, it will be o.k.”

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[QUOTE=treis]
You don’t think she could have gotten one OB/GYN to see her in all of D.C. within 72 hours? I sure as hell think she could. Regardless, she should have tried a hell of a lot harder. Blaming Bush is a simple cop-out for her gross lack of responsibilty. If you don’t want to get pregnant you don’t have sex without protection, and you sure as hell don’t say “well I am 42, it will be o.k.”
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Have you ever listened in on a woman trying to make an appointment with a gynecologist, much less an Ob/Gyn? It flat out doesn’t work that way. If you are lucky, you will get an appointment in 7-10 days. This is speaking from my experience in this small, podunk town.

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[QUOTE=Zabali_Clawbane]
Have you ever listened in on a woman trying to make an appointment with a gynecologist, much less an Ob/Gyn? It flat out doesn’t work that way. If you are lucky, you will get an appointment in 7-10 days. This is speaking from my experience in this small, podunk town.
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Can’t say I have personal experience with Ob/Gyn’s, but I do have experience getting appointments with doctors. I’ve found very little difficulty in finding someone that can squeeze me in. I am sure it’s different in a small, podunk town, but there have to be a hundred OB/GYN’s in D.C. In fact in literally 10 seconds of googling I found a list of what seems to be 70 or so, link. I would be pretty damn shocked if I couldn’t find one of them to squeeze me in.

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[QUOTE=treis]
Can’t say I have personal experience with Ob/Gyn’s, but I do have experience getting appointments with doctors. I’ve found very little difficulty in finding someone that can squeeze me in. I am sure it’s different in a small, podunk town, but there have to be a hundred OB/GYN’s in D.C. In fact in literally 10 seconds of googling I found a list of what seems to be 70 or so, link. I would be pretty damn shocked if I couldn’t find one of them to squeeze me in.
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I live in the same area as the woman who wrote the Washington Post article - the Virginia suburbs of DC. I have lived here my whole life.

It’s always been really hard to get an appointment with my own doctor right away. People have to book appointments weeks or months in advance. If it’s an emergency, they will tell you sorry, we don’t have anything available, you’ll have to go to the emergency room.

Now if you pick a doctor at random out of the phone book, it’s going to be many times harder. When I moved to a different town in VA, and was trying to find a new doctor, I was told by many doctors that I called that they were either (1) not taking new patients right now or (2) unless I was an existing patient, I would have to wait 3-4 weeks for an appointment.

My female coworkers have had the same experience. In several instances, a new employee will start at my company and upon getting the new health insurance will try to find a new doctor. Some of my coworkers have had to call 10 or more doctors before they found one that would take a new patient. I hear complaints all the time about how long you have to wait for an appointment.

I’ll never forget the time I had an extreme bladder/urinary tract infection where I was peeing blood and in tremendous pain, and I called my doctor, who I have been with for years and years, and they would not see me because they didn’t have any appointments. All I needed was a simple antibiotic prescription, and they would not see me. I had to go to the ER and my health insurance ended up paying several hundred dollars more for that.

So treis, are you shocked now? :eek:

The point you seem to be missing is that for emergency care, you should not have to pull out a phone book and make dozens of calls to get care.

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[QUOTE=lissener]
What part of “Ohio” don’t you understand?
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Beg your pardon?

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threemae, may I ask what about the woman’s blog causes you to have such misgivings about her description of events?

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I, AHunter3, am less than clinically ignorant about abortions and should the time come when it would be useful, I will engage in activities (ideally in conjunction with and as assistant to the activities of a doctor) that will terminate a pregnancy safely and in keeping with medical protocols; and will teach what I know.

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[QUOTE=nyctea scandiaca]
Women shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to access EC. There is no logical reason I can think of to make EC so hard to get. It’s not dangerous and there is no potential for abuse or diversion.
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This is the part that bothers me most. There’s no reason for emergency contraception to be prescription only. Aside from causing some nausea, emergency contraception is virtually inoccuous. It’s vastly safer than many other drugs available without a prescription; an FDA advisory panel recommended that it be made available over the counter, but under political pressure the FDA decided not to do so. It is simply ridiculous for an agency like the FDA to play politics in this way; the safety and utility of providing the morning after pill freely is undeniable. Medical experts on the FDA’s own panel agreed with this - but politics prevented it from happening.

And this sheds some light on the mindset of the pro-life movement. The fact that this contraceptive pill would prevent abortions if it were freely available means that the right-to-lifers ought to be all over it. But they’re not - many of the same groups that oppose access to abortion oppose access to emergency contraception as well. It shows that the life of the “unborn child” falls a lot lower on their agenda than exerting control over women’s uteruses.

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[QUOTE=nyctea scandiaca]

Note to self: when deciding on a doctor, make sure to ask them if they will prescribe EC before putting them down as your primary care physician…
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More than that… go ahead and get a prescription of Plan B and have it filled. You can keep it on hand for yourself, altough this might be symbolic given that it should be available over the counter in relatively short order.

Moving on: why do I doubt this blog?

Check out, “BB’s Story.” In case you don’t have the time to read it; well, I don’t either. But it starts with her being raped as a 10 year old by her uncle and it all goes downhill from there. All 52 pages of it in MS Word. Before the age of 17:
-she was raped by Richard at 10
-she was raped by Scott at 13 "Then, my boyfriend was kissing me. Soon, my friend was nearly naked, having sex with her boyfriend right next to us. I was scared but I let Scott continue kissing me and touching me. "
-made a tour through alcohol and drug rehab by 14
-raped by Kevin at 15
-manipulated into sex by Jimmy at 15
-raped by Steve at 16
-group sex with other couples is an ongoing theme “Soon, Dale pulled Danielle to the ground and began to take her clothes off. Steve followed suit. I remember feeling like I had been tricked but I did it anyway, I was so enmeshed in keeping him happy that I did anything he wanted. Steven and I had sex on the floor with Danielle and Dale”
-She works as a stripper at 16 selling her underwear to travelling businesmen "During this time Steve would kind of push Deanna and I to entertain other guys. I think he loved having a stripper for a girlfriend and would ‘show me off’ in a myriad of ways to his friends. "

I cannot help the feeling that this “blog” is at best a stretch version of the truth. Similarly, I don’t believe that a single ER in a 3000 square mile swath of Ohio won’t prescribe EC.

That there are damnable difficulties in obtaining it I’ll buy. I’ve written on these Boards about precisely that issue. I don’t believe that a blogger like this is the best way to point out the failures of our healthcare system.

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[QUOTE=Excalibre]
but under political pressure the FDA decided not to do so.
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Fortunately this decision has been reversed and EC should be available OTC by the start of 2007 for people 18 and over. Some states including Alaska and California already permit it OTC; in others nurses can prescribe it over the phone and it can be picked up at a local pharmacy (assuming your pharmacist doesn’t refuse to fill it).

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Well, it does tend to happen that trauma tends to set people up for later victimization. If someone is carrying around a lot of trauma from early sexual abuse, it’s not unlikely that they would pick out assholes later. Granted, the story sounded pretty extreme, but it doesn’t necessarily strike me as impossible. There’s also the tendency of people who’ve been traumatized to find trauma a bit more easily in subsequent events that to another person might be merely unpleasant. That’s not to invalidate a person’s feelings - because they genuinely feel what they’re describing. But those feelings aren’t necessarily based on reasonable responses to what actually happened.

Of course, the author chalks it all up to “The Patriarchy”, rather than understanding her own role in what happened to her (not to blame her, because it’s not her fault, but obviously the commonality in all those relationships was the author.) That suggests some confused thinking. It’s actually been my thought for a while that the extremist feminism espoused by this chick and people like Andrea Dworkin in most cases stems directly from the feminists’ personal reactions to their own traumatic pasts, rather than being the result of a rational thought process.

[QUOTE=threemae]
Fortunately this decision has been reversed and EC should be available OTC by the start of 2007 for people 18 and over. Some states including Alaska and California already permit it OTC; in others nurses can prescribe it over the phone and it can be picked up at a local pharmacy (assuming your pharmacist doesn’t refuse to fill it).
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Wait, seriously? I hadn’t heard. That’s awesome!

56

Oh. My. God.
America sounds very much like a theocratic Islamic country at times like this.

EC-pills have been over the counter in The Netherlands since 2004, now.

From the link, in Dutch;

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And I now have another item on my list of “Reasons why I’m happy I am not an American”.

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To be overwhelmingly fair to the pro-life lobby, they say that they believe a fertilized egg is equivalent to a born child. As soon as that sperm gets in, bingo, new human being, with all the rights appurtenant thereto. If that were true, EC could be killing a baby.

However, as I understand it, according to the medical definition, pregnancy begins after implantation. So people asserting that EC is abortion are not accurate as far as accepted medical terms.

I also seriously doubt that these people truly believe a fertilized egg is the same as a baby. They may believe that they believe it, but their actions speak otherwise. From the fact that a fertilized egg is not destined to become a single, unique human being (IIRC, it splits and part becomes the placenta, and in any case there’s twins and such), to the oft-cited fact that strident pro-lifers still treat the death of a child much more seriously than an early miscarriage, to the insidious misogyny of the crusade, it seems clear that the surface motivations are not without underlying agendas.

I agree that this blog is pretty out there, and is probably exaggerated for dramatic effect. (For instance, PPs in Ohio are open on Saturday - she could have called them earlier; also, EC is recommended within 72 hours, so Monday wasn’t an impossible time to wait for.) However, I bet she did call doctors and ERs and get some unbelievably unprofessional questions about her sex life, revealing that (for those people) the real issue is punishing sluts for enjoying sex, not saving babies.

Barring the PP option, I would have called a new ER and told them I was a virgin nun who was raped, if that’s what it took. Women don’t owe honesty to people pulling this crap.

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[QUOTE=Unauthorized Cinnamon]
To be overwhelmingly fair to the pro-life lobby, they say that they believe a fertilized egg is equivalent to a born child. As soon as that sperm gets in, bingo, new human being, with all the rights appurtenant thereto. If that were true, EC could be killing a baby.

However, as I understand it, according to the medical definition, pregnancy begins after implantation. So people asserting that EC is abortion are not accurate as far as accepted medical terms.
[/quote]

Except that, as far as I’ve heard, research shows that the mechanism that emergency contraception works by is preventing ovulation (which is why it’s not more effective, and why its effectiveness falls so dramatically as time passes. It’s much more effective within the first 24 hours, and only 75% effective or so after three days.)

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[QUOTE=Maastricht]
Oh. My. God.
America sounds very much like a theocratic Islamic country at times like this.

EC-pills have been over the counter in The Netherlands since 2004, now.

From the link, in Dutch;
[/QUOTE]

Wow. We’re 2.5 years behind you. How barbaric. :rolleyes: