What is up with the doctor and the medical director in this case? I am really sick of health care professionals who want to equate contraception with abortion — and those who want to push their religious viewpoints on defenseless patients. But here’s what makes me furious about this particular case:
Rebuffed by the doctor, the woman called her gynecologist, who wrote the prescription. Her local pharmacy told her it was out of the drug and referred her to a sister store in Reading.
The former medical director of the hospital said he sees nothing strange about asking a woman from eastern Lebanon County to drive to Reading for a drug.
“People drive to Reading to buy jeans. Even if that were the case, that you had to drive to Reading to get this [prescription], to me that does not rise to a compulsion that you have to pass laws that [doctors] have to do something,” Dr. Joe Kearns said.
Just exactly how insensitive can one person be? How on earth can this man equate a young woman who has just been knocked unconscious and raped with someone shopping for jeans? Does he think that victims of other violent crimes should be forced to make a 60-mile round trip in order to obtain legal medication?
And another thing. Doctor friends, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t emergency contraception basically just a big dose of birth control pills that prevents ovulation and therefore fertilization? So if the pharmacy had birth control pills in stock, could not the pharmacist have given this young woman a pill pack and dosing directions?
I’m afraid the doctor has his priorities seriously screwed up:
“This is an issue I’ve struggled with for years,” [Dr. Martin] Gish said. “My current feeling is life begins at conception, and I feel that anything that interferes with that” causes an abortion.
“The dilemma I have is the whole rape issue: Which side are you more concerned with? Are you more concerned about the mother or the life that was possibly created? That’s my dilemma,” he said. “I personally don’t have this thing worked out. I’m not sure how my faith can line up with my practice at times of what I’m asked to do.”
Are you more concerned with the mother or the life that was possibly created? This woman isn’t a mother; she’s a victim of a violent crime. If she was given emergency contraception when she first asked for it, there would be no conception. Does this doctor really believe that any woman of child-bearing age is just an open womb for rapists?
And I have to wonder what he would say if, God forbid, the rape victim was his wife, daughter, or sister?
Hi, I followed your link from Shakes.
What amazes me (well, one of the many, many things) is that the emergency room physician doesn’t have a clue how Plan B actually works. If his belief is that life begins at conception, then he should have no moral qualms about prescribing Plan B. Lordy!
Shelly, thanks for coming by. It is incredible that the doctor doesn’t know basic reproductive biology. Unfortunately, it appears he’s not alone in his ignorance.
Big dose of birth control pills: yes, as I understand it that is exactly what Plan B is, and what’s more in the past, and no doubt now also, doctors have instructed patients to use a packful in just that way.
Honestly, I can’t see what all the fuss is about Plan B, just that you have to swallow 21 tiny pills instead of one. (Surely the formulation is slightly different.)
But yeah, my question would have to be, what is wrong with the gynecologist of this raped girl that s/he didn’t just say, here’s a script for generic Ortho-Novum, take three weeks’ worth and call me in the morning? Esp. if s/he knew the “climate” at the local pharmacy. I think your suggestion that the pharmacist do it is maybe a little out of line, Kath – I don’t think they’re allowed to offer substitutions like that. Although of course a sympathetic pharmacist could have suggested she call her Dr. for a different prescription.
Blue jeans. Jeez. I guess while she was procuring her abortion in Reading, she could have picked up a pair of jeans, and maybe a nice set of steak knives and a new garden hose.
Plan B is a big dose of oral contraceptives that prevents ovulation. It also causes thickening of vaginal secretions so those pesky sperm get stuck. I wish I had the percentages in front of me, but as a third line of defense, some tiny percent of the time, it works by making the uterus inhospitable to an embryo. Hence the outcry; and the outcry about oral contraceptives in some camps. The gynecologist phoned in Plan B. The pharmacist can’t switch that prescription to a birth control pack without the doctor’s consent. He could have called the gynecologist back, but it was easier to send her on to Reading.
450 God-given plants, including coffee and tobacco, flush billions of embryos out of women’s bodies every year yet know-it-all anti-choicers refuse to criminalize and renounce their OWN addictions to such “baby-killing” concoctions served in church and GOP events. This PA doctor should be picketed for his wife’s COFFEE POT “abortions”! Moreover, he’s an accomplice to the victim’s RAPIST!