From the Chicago Tribune (“Pharmacists, doctors refuse to dispense pill on moral grounds“):
Karen Poehailos, a family physician in Charlottesville, Va., doesn’t prescribe any form of contraception, or recommend or perform sterilization–for women or men. And she won’t refer patients to doctors who do. She bristles at the notion that doctors who don’t prescribe the pill or other contraception are denying patients care.
Poehailos stopped prescribing contraception in 1996 after gaining a “clearer understanding” of her faith, Catholicism, she says, and learning from a pamphlet circulating at her church that the pill could potentially prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. “I didn’t believe it,” she said of the pamphlet’s contention. “I wanted to prove [the pamphlet] wrong.”
Now after eight years, Poehailos said she has found alternate ways to help patients manage their fertility, as well as many other conditions for which the pill is commonly prescribed, from acne to dysmenorrhea and menstrual irregularity.
Some of these conditions are symptoms of underlying problems, and getting to the bottom of them “takes longer than giving a pill prescription,” Poehailos said. “I actually do far more reading on endocrinology now than I did when I was prescribing the pill.”
It is breathtakingly reckless for a physician to refuse to act in the best interest of their patient’s health. By Dr. Poehailos’s own admission, she is withholding the simplest, most effective treatment for a variety of conditions.
If she’s opposed to birth control, she shouldn’t use it.
This is insanity.