“You can’t have contraceptives, you’re not married.”

Some of you may have heard that the emergency-contraception pill is now available in the States.

Or rather, it is conditionally available. That is, if your reasons for wanting it meet the standards of your physician’s moral code, you may have a prescription for it. If you’ve been raped, they’ll allow it. If you’re married and just didn’t happen to be on birth control, that’s all right. But if you’re unmarried and in a monogomous relationship, using alternative forms of birth control that happen to fail, you’re out of luck.

It seems to me that this should be grounds for investigation by the AMA, or something. We have doctors who are using subjective moral standards, not health or medical training, to determine whether or not to give a patient a certain treatment. If a doctor is unwilling to do his damn job, he should perhaps consider another profession.

At the risk of generating controversy in my relatively vanilla corner of cyberspace, I’ll share this quote from DailyKos (unfortunately I cannot find the original link to it):

I’ve said it a hundred times… (7+ / 0-)

and I’m going to continue saying it for the rest of my fertile years, then I’m going to change the pronoun to refer to other women: I owe no one a baby. Repeat: I owe no one a baby. No one can demand that I have a baby. My personal sexual activities do not involve a contract with the general public to provide another citizen. They do not even require that I provide a partner with a baby. My body is not public property. Any interest the state can legitimately take in the condition of my body is related to protecting my rights as a citizen, not condoning infringement on those same rights by others. My physical autonomy and integrity always take precedence over a fetus’s interests, unless I voluntarily choose otherwise. Anything less than the above is essentially a reduced form of citizenship. Period.

latts, on Wed Sep 20, 2006 at 12:50:43 PM PDT

And just for reference, because I think it’s good to counteract the kind of smug, holier-than-thou power play these doctors are performing, here’s a place you can get emergency contraception, and directions for using traditional birth control as emergency contraception.