I eat lunch at home most days, and most days, the mail has arrived by the time I get home for lunch. I usually check the mail and the toss it on the coffee table to check out after work.
Today was an execption, as I got my Prevention magazine today. Now usually, Prevention is also just tossed on the coffee table. However, there was a cover story that I just had to read right then. I didn’t even bother with lunch first.
“Special Report: The New BIRTH CONTROL BAN. What you need to know”
I freak out thinking that our darling President and his cronies are up to something else that will make me want to pop somebody’s eyeballs out with a fork. This is actually not the case though.
The case is this. The article, “Access Denied”, details the fact that there are doctors and pharmacists in this country who don’t believe in hormonal birth control, and so won’t prescribe it or fill a prescription for it.
WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?
Reading on, I find that the heart of the matter is the possiblity that hormonal birth control might interfere with the implantation of a fertilized egg, and thus cause a “chemical abortion.” Nevermind the fact that medically a woman is not pregnant until implantation (pg 154, Aug 2004 Prevention), as a doctor cannot detect the pregnancy until then. Nevermind the fact that there is “no science to back the theory that birth control pills really do discourage implantation” (pg 154, Aug 2004 Prevention).
I am not a doctor. I don’t read clinical journals. I read some biological journals, and some medically significant news appears there. But I have never heard of this, and I am livid.
Why in the world should a doctor or pharmacist be allowed to say “I’m morally against this, so you can’t have it. I don’t care that you need it for a medical condition (ex endometriosis), I don’t care if you’d be the worst parent on the face of the planet. You have to have any baby that comes along.”
I am not society’s baby making machine. Nor is any other woman.
My mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers and so on, all fought for these rights that I often take for granted. I’m usually busy fighting other fights, that it is my turn to fight. I can’t believe I’m about to have to fight this fight again, because some assholes feel like it’s okay to force their morality on me.
You can’t take away my birth control. You can’t take away my right to work. You can’t take away my right to live my life as I see fit.
Has anybody else read this article? Or worse, experienced this sort of problem?
If anyone is interested in the article, it is in Prevention magazine’s August 2004 issue, pages 150-159 & 184-185.
), many doctors do refuse to put IUDs into women who’ve never been pregnant because of concerns about their future fertility. It seems that quite some time ago, there were some studies that indicated nulliparous (sp?) women with IUDs were marginally less fertile afterward than other women in their age groups. Of course, since these women had never been pregnant before, nobody knew if they’d had fertility issues prior to the IUD or not. And even if the fertility issues were caused by the IUD, it was a pretty small risk. It was enough that most doctors of the time flat-out refused to put one into someone who’d never been pregnant, though, even if the patient was willing to assume any and all risks. (And frankly, I’d think most people would be far more concerned about the risk of uterine perforation and death than future infertility, but that’s just me.) The studies have since been shown to a big load of crap, anyway, but a suprising lot of doctors still refuse to even consider IUDs for non-mommies. Apparently, we know what we want enough to consent to something that could kill us, but not enough to consent to something that could reduce our fertility. There just aren’t enough rolly-eye smilies on the Web, really.