This annoys me

[a_winter_dawn]

I've been on the NARAL mailing list since I was about 19. NARAL is a national lobbying organization committed to keep abortion legal. For obvious reasons, being on NARAL's mailing list puts me on a lot of OTHER mailing lists

Comments

[puf_almighty]

This is sort of off topic, but it's an opportunity to show you this link I found on the topic of EC denial.

I agree with 1). I'd suggest you post this around in some on topic communities, but you might just get more flames than you want, so eh.
Lies on either side are always ugly. I wish nobody'd do it, I mean if you can't get people pumped or active over the truth, then you should either convince them that the truth is a real deal, or accept that, yeah, nobody's worried about it.

2) I'm not sure I do agree, at least not without reservations. I mean, when you open up a business, you're supposedly providing a service, and if you're effectively outcompeting other businesses- removing them from the market- then you have an obligation to provide the services that they used to provide. So if you're CVS and you walk in and kick out all the local pharmacies, and then refuse to provide the EC that they provided while still keeping them out of the market by beating them on all other markets to sufficient degree, it's like you've basically assassinated that service. You've eliminated that service from the market, and capitalism is failing to re-provide it. Now if it's a non-critical service like "Dark Horse comic books" or "Bread sticks," then that's okay, nobody's gonna get their lives fucked up on it. But if you're assassinating a critical service out of the market, like medical services, or utilities, that's messed up and there should be some obligation, moral or legislative, to fulfill those fundamentals.

People wouldn't accept someone competing electricity or cable out of the market for some of the population. Like if you had an electricity company which came in, was able to provide cheaper services to 80% of the community and so eliminated the existing company, and then denied service to the 20% they found least profitable. Then the old company couldn't come back in and effectively support itself on the 20% remainder. This would not be accepted by the community because it's denial of a critical service, but that's exactly what's happening when these big companies deny EC.

I wonder if you could feasibly run a small, booth-like service providing exclusively the medications that these bullshit companies deny, or whether basic licensing fees would make that prohibitive.

3) Basically, yeah.

4) But putting it in the hands of a physician makes physicians able to do this very bullshit we see in the link I posted. What then?

Regarding #2

[a_winter_dawn]

First off, I think you missed what I was saying. It is ALREADY legal for large chains to decide not to provide contraception. No one is currently debating the right of business owners and corporate decision-makers to deny these products; that right is granted to them, and in fact, Wal-Mart does not carry EC. On either the corporate level or the level of an individual employee, organizations like PPFA are hard-pressed to demonstrate a situation where the refusal of an individual or a company to provide EC results in an inability for the woman to obtain EC at all. Most hospitals at which EC can be prescribed also have in-house pharmacies that will fill the prescription. (A Catholic hospital like St. E's, of course, will neither prescribe nor fill a prescription for EC, for moral reasons, and they are considered to be perfectly within their right to do so.) In the worst case scenario, a woman may have to drive to another town to fill a prescription, which you couldn't do with electricity, so the utility analogy isn't perfectly functional. And, following that tangent, Time Warner requested and won the right to deny their most expensive services in neighborhoods where the numbers of subscribers were likely to be too low to make a profit.

Regarding the girl's story, the exact same thing happened to me during the Thanksgiving Holiday. Don't you remember? The moral of the story is, talk to your regular doctor and get EC in advance. Notice how the girl said that her system gave her nasty side effects from the low-dose contraception she takes? Do you realize that EC is just nuclear-high-strength hormonal contraception? In fact, you can just take a month's worth of regular birth control instead of EC. So, had she been prescribed EC by some strange doctor who knew nothing about her, or been given EC over the counter, and her body had a severe medical reaction, who would have been to blame then? It's entirely possible that doctors dodge this issue because of it's extreme litigation factor. I mean, it's hard to believe that every doctor on duty at every hospital all weekend in the whole state was a staunch pro-lifer. There must have been some other explanation.