[Leslie Carol Botha: More legalized rape on women. The study indicated that IUD's are a highly effective method of contraception after unprotected intercourse when inserted post-coitally. Unnecessary infliction of pain on women.  Those who have had IUD's will concur.  Mental/emotional stress plus physical pain.  Oh, yeah - another win situation for women. Sounds like they are marketing IUD's on a desperate demographic of women]

IUDs Effective as Emergency Contraception

MedPage Today

By Shalmali Pal, Contributing Editor, MedPage Today
Published: May 09, 2012

Intrauterine devices (IUDs) seem to be an effective method of emergency contraception, with a failure rate of less than one per thousand, according to a meta-analysis.

In a review of 35 years of data in which IUDs were inserted after unprotected intercourse, 99.86% of overall women did not become pregnant, reported Kelly Cleland, a research scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and colleagues in Human Reproduction.

Unintended pregnancy is a significant problem, with at least 36% of pregnancies worldwide and nearly half of pregnancies in the U.S. being unintended, the authors noted in their introduction. Emergency contraception is a popular method for preventing unwanted pregnancy, with oral methods such as levonorgestrel (Plan B) and ulipristal acetate (Ella or EllaOne), among the leading medications used.

Although IUDs are another option, negative experiences with the Dalkon Shield in the 1970s led to years of low IUD use, the authors pointed out. But one of the major advantages of copper IUDs is that after placement for emergency contraception, the device can be left in and will continue to prevent pregnancy for at least a decade.

Cleland’s group conducted a systematic review intended to provide a current estimate of the efficacy of IUDs as emergency contraception. They found 274 articles, in English and Chinese, published by August 2011 but narrowed the list to 42 studies published from 1979 to 2011.

The authors noted that they included studies published in Chinese because, according to China’s family planning commission, 53% of married women surveyed in 2009 who used contraception opted for an IUD.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at The IUD: Emergency Contraception & Birth Control Rolled Into One No Muss No Fuss

[Leslie Carol Botha: Reproductive rights and the choice when to have children is crucial to women's health and sanity. Honduras has virtually slapped all women in the face for their barbaric ban and punishment for women who use emergency contraception making the offense equal to having an abortion.]

Honduras Supreme Court Upholds Absolute Ban on Emergency Contraception, Opens Door to Criminalize Women and Medical Professionals

02.13.12 - (PRESS RELEASE) The Honduras Supreme Court has upheld the country’s absolute ban on emergency contraception, which would criminalize the sale, distribution, and use of  the “morning-after pill” — imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.

“By banning and criminalizing emergency contraception, Honduras is telling the world it would rather imprison the women of its country than provide them with safe and effective birth control,” said Luisa Cabal, director of international legal programs at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Today’s decision from the Honduras Supreme Court blatantly disregards women’s fundamental reproductive rights and completely ignores the respected medical opinion of experts around the globe. It will cause significant harm in the lives countless women and doctors across the country.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights has been working with local and international women’s rights groups to fight this ban on emergency contraception since it was first passed by the Honduran Congress in April 2009. Then-President José Manuel Zelaya was successfully urged to veto the ban a month after it was passed — immediately making the issue a matter before the Supreme Court.

However, following the country’s June 2009 coup d’état, the de facto minister of health issued an administrative regulation in October 2009 banning emergency contraception, despite not yet having a ruling from the Supreme Court that would allow criminal enforcement of the ban.

Nearly three years after the ban was vetoed by President Zelaya, today’s ruling now allows the Honduran Congress to impose the previously proposed criminal punishments on any medical professionals who distribute and sell emergency contraception and any woman who uses or attempts to use the medication to prevent an unintended pregnancy.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Honduras Stands Behind Ban to Punish Those Who Use Emergency Contraception

NPR

February 6, 2012

Plan B is available over the counter for people 17 and older.

Access to emergency contraception has swirled at the center of a recent flurry of debate over insurance coverage. It’s a pill women can take if their birth control fails or they forget to use it.

The most popular brand of emergency contraception is called “Plan B One-Step.” You might better know it as the “morning after” pill. Today, about 10 percent of sexually active women say they’ve used it.

Katie Wilcox, a 20-something college graduate, is a typical example of who uses it. She’s working now and has a boyfriend. She’s used Plan B twice. The first time she was still in college.

“We kind of got caught up in the moment,” she says. “[We] woke up in the morning and decided that we needed to go get Plan B, because neither of us were ready for any sort of pregnancy.”

So Wilcox and her boyfriend headed to their local pharmacy. She presented ID and was able to buy Plan B without a prescription. (The age requirement to buy Plan B is 17, despite a recent push by the Food and Drug Administration to make it more accessible.) After that, Wilcox and her boyfriend decided to use condoms. Then one broke. Again, they turned to Plan B.

“I can’t even describe how important it was,” she says. “It’s an important option for girls at that age to have because … things happen.”

Wilcox didn’t get pregnant. Emergency contraception prevents pregnancy 89 percent of the time if women take it within three days of unprotected sex. And it’s very safe, causing only minor side effects, such as nausea or headache.

Dr. Katherine White says most of her patients take Plan B right away, but it can work even if they wait a lot longer. “Emergency contraception, or Plan B, can be very effective up to … five days after the act of unprotected intercourse,” says White, an obstetrician at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass.

Plan B is a synthetic dose of the hormone progesterone. It’s the same hormone that’s in typical birth control pills — but at a higher dose. It works primarily by stopping the ovaries from releasing an egg. No egg, no pregnancy.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at The ‘Morning After’ Pill: How It Works And Who Uses It

JAMA

January 4, 2012
Robert Steinbrook, MD

On December 7, 2011, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) decision that levonorgestrel emergency contraception (sold under the brand name Plan B One-Step) was safe and effective for all women of childbearing potential, regardless of their age, and should be approved for sale as a nonprescription drug. Plan B One-Step is a single-dose 1.5-mg tablet of levonorgestrel that should be taken as soon as possible and within 72 hours after an episode of unprotected intercourse.

Emphasizing a concern about nonprescription use by the youngest girls of reproductive age, Sebelius wrote to Margaret Hamburg, MD, the FDA commissioner that the studies submitted to the agency “do not include data on all ages for which the drug would be approved and available over the counter” and “do not establish that prescription dispensing requirements should be eliminated for all ages.”^1​ Although the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary has the legal authority under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to reverse an FDA decision, Sebelius was apparently the first to ever do so.

Plan B One-Step is manufactured by Teva Women’s Health and sells for about US $50. The FDA has approved the drug for use without a prescription in women aged 17 years or older and with a prescription for those who are younger. Most who use emergency contraception are 17 years or older. The pills are dispensed from behind the counter at pharmacies and clinics; they are more difficult to obtain than they would be if they were in the aisles of pharmacies, grocers, and other retailers, as are condoms and spermicides. A generic product that consists of two 0.75-mg pills of levonorgestrel (sold under the brand name Next Choice) is also approved under the same dual status.

Federal agencies know that decisions involving sexual matters are often controversial. But virtually no one foresaw the extraordinary reversal of an FDA decision about drug approval by a secretary in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, a decision the president said that he fully supported.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Science, Politics, and Over-the-Counter Emergency Contraception

JAMA

January 4, 2012

To the Editor: In 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration facilitated access to emergency contraception among adolescents by making it available over-the-counter to individuals aged 17 years or older. A disproportionate number of teen pregnancies occur among adolescents from disadvantaged neighborhoods.^1​,2,3​ The availability and accessibility of emergency contraception in these neighborhoods relative to more affluent ones is unknown.

One possibility is that pharmacies in low-income communities are more likely to stock emergency contraception and are more versed in regulations regarding over-the-counter dispensing. Conversely, suboptimal access to many health services has been documented for low-income populations,^4,5​ and pharmacy staff could be less likely to convey accurate information. We sought to understand differences in availability of and access to emergency contraception across low- and non–low-income US neighborhoods.

From September to December 2010, female research assistants posing as adolescents who recently had unprotected intercourse were randomly assigned to call every commercial pharmacy in Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon. We chose cities in geographically diverse states without pharmacy access laws that supersede uniform federal regulations. Lists of pharmacies were obtained from state boards of pharmacy. Calls were made weekdays between 9 AM and 5 PM, when pharmacies would presumably be fully staffed. Callers followed standardized scripts (Figure; details available on request) to simulate real-world calls and elicit specific information on emergency contraception availability and access. We examined same-day availability of emergency contraception, whether emergency contraception could be accessed by the caller, and whether the pharmacy communicated the correct age at which emergency contraception is accessible over-the-counter.

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Read the complete article and related information at Access to Emergency Contraception for Adolescents

The Intel Hub

A seismic shift is now occurring in the forces that will control health care in the United States and around the world. It is a shift in power away from the World Health Organization (WHO) and into a new alliance of wealthy governments (the G8), United Nations groups, and elite international non-governmental power brokers such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

American taxpayers should be alarmed. This means that tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars for “humanitarian” foreign aide is being spent on objectives never approved by Congress. Americans should pay attention when Bill Gates makes very public proclamations about the need to reduce the surplus population.

By Byron Richards
Wellness Resources
August 11, 2011

On July 29, 2011 the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health sounded the population alarm bell in the international science journal, Science, advocating for international contraception efforts to be funded by wealthy countries.

On August 1, 2011 the Obama administration announced its plan to force health insurers, beginning in 2013, to pay for “free” birth control for all U.S. women, including free birth control pills, morning after pills, sterilization, and any other “FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling.”

Americans should understand that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg is well-versed in eugenics theory, as both of her elite psychiatrist parents have headed the American Eugenics Society.

We are rapidly moving toward the time when government bureaucrats issue regulations to determine which fetuses, at five weeks of age, are genetically fit enough to be born.

A Brief History of Eugenics

The goal of eugenics is to utilize science to improve the genetic composition of a population. The elite eugenics ruling class is terrified of rapid population growth in “undesirable genetic stock.”

Their efforts are focused on controlling rapid population growth in developing countries, such as African nations, and in minority groups in the United States and other developed countries.

The “scientific” theory of eugenics originated in the 19th century with the works of Charles Darwin and others. Its theory was adopted as a core principle of genetic research by The Rockefeller University, Carnegie Institution for Science, and others at the beginning of the 20th century.

It was openly promoted and discussed for the first four decades of the 20th century. It even gained a supportive Supreme Court ruling in 1927 which allowed for sterilization of mental health patients. Moreover, American eugenics-oriented psychiatrists continued to force sterilization on mental health patients into the 1970s.

Beginning in 1910 and ending in 1944, a massive database of genetic information on Americans and related eugenics articles were collected in a Rockefeller and Carnegie-funded data repository known as the Eugenics Record Office.

WWII sent the public face and target of eugenics to scurry for cover as Hitler applied the theory to the Jews, giving the eugenics movement a major black eye. However, behind the scenes, American psychiatrists, German psychiatrists, and the heads of Rockefeller maintained their close working relationships.

At the conclusion of WWII, the Rockefellers allotted land in New York City to house the United Nations (UN), an organization founded on the core beliefs of the elite eugenics thinkers.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at The Revitalized Eugenics Movement & the FDA’s Role

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – More U.S. women seem to be using the “morning-after” pill now that the emergency contraceptive is available over-the-counter, a new study finds.

Researchers found that between 2006 and 2008, about twice as many women ages 15 to 44 said they had used emergency contraception, compared with four to six years earlier — when it was still restricted to prescription-only.

The emergency contraceptive Plan B has been available in the U.S. since 1999. The pills, which contain the hormone progestin, cut the risk of pregnancy after unprotected sex by stopping the ovaries from releasing an egg.

However, the contraceptive must be taken within 72 hours of having sex — and the sooner, the better. After the first 12 hours the risk of pregnancy increases by 50 percent.

So in 2006, after years of political controversy, the U.S. approved Plan B for “behind-the-counter” sales to adults — meaning they could get it from a pharmacy without waiting for a prescription. The age restriction was later lowered to 17 in 2009.

In the new study, researchers looked at data from a periodic government survey to see how national rates of emergency-contraception use may be changing.

They found that of more than 6,300 sexually active U.S. women surveyed between 2006 and 2008, nearly 10 percent said they had ever used emergency contraception.

Read More…

Read the complete article and related information at More U.S. women using “morning-after” pill: study

Pregnant women should be told that having an abortion is safer than having the baby, according to medical chiefs

The Telegraph

By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent 10:00PM GMT 26 Feb 2011

Never before has official advice to doctors and nurses in Britain instructed them to use such comparisons to help pregnant women decide whether to keep a child

Never before has official advice to doctors and nurses in Britain instructed them to use such comparisons to help pregnant women decide whether to keep a child.

Current guidance simply tells doctors and nurses that they should “be equipped” to provide accurate information about the relative dangers.

Josephine Quintavalle, of the Pro-Life Alliance accused the royal college of “manipulating the evidence” in order to promote a pro-choice message. She said: “I don’t believe that most women considering abortions are worried it will kill them or are worrying about dying in childbirth; this is a blatant attempt to force an absurdly liberal agenda on women when they are at their most vulnerable.”

Speaking in a personal capacity, Prof Patricia Casey, a consultant psychiatrist and fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “The message this sends out is very worrying. There are more than 30 studies showing an association between psychological trauma and abortion.”

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Abortion is safer than having a baby, doctors say

VirtualMedicalCentre.com

Australia

Let’s face it, unprotected sex does happen and sometimes, with a bit of bad luck, condoms can break and situations can arise where a woman may need emergency contraception. This kind of contraception is used after sex but before you are pregnant. If you are unsure about talking with the pharmacist or GP for any reason – don’t be. It’s nothing to get nervous about. In fact, 3 out of 4 unwanted pregnancies could be prevented if all women used emergency contraception after unprotected sex, and many abortions could also be avoided. The power is yours.

Eggs over easy: The right time to use it

Did you know there is a small time period after sex in which a woman is not yet pregnant? This happens for several reasons. An egg can only be fertilised when it leaves the ovaries and reaches the womb. So even though wily sperm can loiter around the womb, flowers in hand, for up to five days after unprotected sex, the egg still needs to show up for the date in order for conception to occur.

And even if an egg does become fertilised, it needs to become implanted into the womb wall, which only happens several days after the egg is fertilised. Many fertilised eggs do not implant in the womb, and when the egg does not implant within a seven-day timeframe, the woman does not become pregnant.

How do they work?

There are three types of emergency contraceptive, and they work in slightly different ways.

The morning after pill contains oestrogen and/or progesterone, the same hormones contained in the contraceptive pill or injection, just in a much greater dose. They work by preventing ovulation (meaning they prevent a woman’s egg from leaving her ovaries), so the egg cannot be fertilised and the sperm are jilted at the altar. However, it’s only effective in the first half of your menstrual cycle because you haven’t yet ovulated.

The intrauterine device is inserted inside a woman’s uterus or womb to cause the lining of the womb to change so that it is not receptive to a fertilised egg. If the egg can’t get comfortable in the womb, then you cannot get pregnant.

Mifepristone (also known as RU486) blocks the hormone progesterone. Without progesterone, an embryo cannot implant or stay implanted in the lining of the uterus.

Only the morning after pill and the IUD are available as emergency contraception in Australia. To receive a prescription for mifepristone, you must talk to your GP.

Read the complete article and related information at Morning after pill: Sisters are doing it for themselves

Care2

February 9, 2011
posted by: Cynthia Samuels

by Joanne Bamberger, PunditMom

What’s happened to the whole Republican “the economy and jobs are our first priority” mantra from the 2010 elections?  Eric Cantor can say it all he wants, but that isn’t making it true.  Instead of jobs, conservatives are once again focused on our lady parts.   While I am sort of  getting used to the new TSA pat downs,  I have to draw the line when it comes to the government getting its hands on my privates.

The GOP is focusing on the budget, but not for creating jobs — they are trying to impact substantive issues through bills that control spending, as they recently did in their (thankfully) failed attempt to redefine rape in the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.” It initially called for limiting the availability of Medicaid funds for abortion only to women who had been “forcibly” raped.

Since the original passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, no federal taxpayer funds have been available to cover the cost of abortions through Medicaid except in instances of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is in danger. The forcible rape exception, introduced by Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), didn’t explicitly spell out in the bill what that meant, but a variety of organizations, including NOW and EMILY’s List, believed it would exclude victims of statutory rape, date rape, rape victims who initially said “no” but weren’t able to fend off their attackers, and women who feared for their lives unless they acquiesced to a rapist’s demands.

Often, Democrats are scarily silent in these debates.  Thankfully Democratic Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut led the charge that ended in having that exception pulled from the bill.  That’s good news as far as it goes.  Fortunately, they’re also spearheading a full court press to make voters aware of the mostly-Republican efforts to further chip away at women’s reproductive health rights.

Their full-court press includes a petition effort encouraging voters to contact their representatives if they disagree with the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.  And now several other Senators have joined with a fiery Gillibrand to protest not only this specific bill, but the GOP’s bait-and-switch agenda:

Read More…

Read the complete article and related information at GOP Budget Wars on Reproductive Health