Help Us Protect Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Care Today!
Sep 28
Starting next year, Oregon and California will be the first two states in the nation to offer birth control without a prescription. Women living in these states will be able to purchase birth control at the pharmacy after undergoing a short health screening performed by their pharmacist. The laws differ somewhat in the two states.…
Jun 24
When I give a presentation about the abortion services we provide in our family medicine clinic, people often ask, “Do you have a counselor to meet with your patients to help them?” I’m a bit put off by this question. I want to say, “It’s my patients with a new diagnosis of diabetes or high blood…
Apr 16
I work once a week at a high volume abortion site. When I’m there I often don’t have the chance to have much of an interaction with the patients in the minute or so that I see them before the anesthesia takes effect. But the other day, I had a quick conversation that really stuck…
Mar 20
We’ve just released two new birth control fact sheets covering Natural Family Planning and Permanent Birth Control (Sterilization). The Natural Family Planning (NFP) fact sheet lays out seven common methods of natural family planning, and compares them by efficacy. The sheet explains how each NFP method works and lists common pros and cons. The Permanent Birth Control…
Jan 30
A couple of years ago, when the Reproductive Health Access Project celebrated its 5th anniversary, we created a special tagline to mark the occasion: making choices real. I loved it. I still love it. It telegraphs the fact that, even though abortion and contraception are legal, many women still face tremendous barriers in accessing this…
Oct 10
The medical students and residents we train are often surprised at the emphasis we put on language in the exam room. Take this recent story from a family doctor in our practice who was working with a medical student: While examining the patient she [the medical student] used phrases like, “Scoot your bottom down until…
Jun 27
“If she were a normal patient…” Physicians use the words “normal” and “abnormal” to differentiate lab values and physical exam findings. But on this evening in particular, in our student-run free clinic in Pennsylvania, our patient had no apparent anomalies. When the physician implied she was abnormal, he wasn’t referring to her health. He was…