Is birth control the mother of all medical malpractice?
by Kelli
You would have a good case for malpractice if your doctor recommended a bone marrow transplant for your common cold. How much better a case would there be if you didn’t even have a cold? In the case of no disease, the prescription of chemicals with side effects and long-term health risks — for any reason except fertility — would be considered inexcusable by any medical standard….
I hear the push-back from women who, like me, are or were using hormonal birth control to manage symptoms of dysmenorrhea, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, or other conditions. I offer for your consideration this question: is birth control so good at relieving your symptoms that it’s easier to delay the onerous diagnostics that could lead to a potential cure for your underlying disease?
Your doctor, who barely spends half an hour a year with you, may be great, but she and the pharmaceutical industry have no financial incentive to steer you in a direction that would reduce your dependence on them. If you don’t resist the inertia of the status quo, nobody else will. For years, I was so grateful for the convenient symptom relief of hormonal birth control, I put off the much more complicated task of diagnosing and treating my endometriosis and ovulation defects until it was too late.
~ Katy French Talento, The Federalist, January 5
[Photo via zuendschwein.de]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
These sorts of articles used to be confined to pro-life blogs and a few Catholic sites devoted to natural family planning.
But now they are appearing in secular political blogs (like The Federalist) and even in some intelligent women’s magazines (like Vanity Fair.)
It’s worth the click to read the whole article at the Federalist. Glad you spotted that one, Kelli.