New Apps Let Women Obtain Birth Control Without Visiting a Doctor

HughPickens.com writes: With nearly 40 percent of all pregnancies in the United States unintended, birth control is a critical public health issue. For short-term methods, visiting the doctor for a prescription can be time-consuming and sometimes costly and for some, like teenagers, it can be intimidating or embarrassing. Now Pam Belluck reports at the NYT that a growing assortment of new apps and websites now make it possible to get prescription contraceptives without going to the doctor as public health experts hope the new apps will encourage more women to start, or restart, using contraception and help reduce the country's stubbornly high rate of unintended pregnancies, as well as the rate of abortions. At least six digital ventures, by private companies and nonprofits, including Planned Parenthood, now provide prescriptions written by clinicians after women answer questions about their health online or by video. All prescribe birth control pills, and some prescribe patches, rings and morning-after pills and some ship contraceptives directly to women's doors. "At first I didn't believe it," said Susan Hashem, who wanted to restart birth control pills without missing work for a doctor's appointment. Hashem used an app called Lemonaid and paid $15 for a doctor to review her medical information and send a pill prescription to a local pharmacy. "I thought it was just a setup to get money," Hashem said. But after she answered the health questions one evening, "a doctor actually contacted me after office hours," and the next morning, she picked up three months' worth of pills.

Comments

Re:We need to stop the abortion. it's just horribl

[swillden]

There is exactly one reference to abortion in the bible. It's in Numbers 5, and it details the process for performing an abortion if you believe your wife has been unfaithful.

Only if you twist the text to fit a pro-abortion viewpoint.

What Numbers 5 actually says is that a man should take a wife suspected of adultery to a priest, who will perform a ritual called the "ordeal of the bitter water". If she is innocent, she'll be fine, but if she's guilty it will cause her belly to swell, her thigh to rot and she will become a curse among her people. Some interpret this to mean that she'll die. Some believe that because "thigh" is occasionally used as a euphemism for reproductive organs, it's the womb that will rot, making it something like an abortion, though making her permanently infertile which is how she'd be a "curse among her people".

So, if it's about abortion at all, it's a process for sterilization or execution.

But it's also not a "process", because it's not the priest's direct actions which cause the result. It's her innocence or guilt that determines the outcome. In other words, God decides, not the husband or the priest, so it's a religious rite not a medical procedure.

Re:We need to stop the abortion. it's just horribl

[ranton]

So, how long do the democrats have to hold total power until they actually start being responsible for bad stuff they do, and can't just blame republicans? 20 years? 100? 1000?

The Democrats would be responsible for starting any war they actually start. Its not that hard to figure out. Wars which are cleaning up the mess of previous administrations can certainly last decades, as it did during the Vietnam War. I'd agree that after about 50 years you could no longer blame the original administration which started the war, but that is an arbitrary figure.