Many people would consider the phrase “contraception-free pharmacy” an oxymoron, but I think it’s a badge of honor. It shows a pro-fertility, pro-family mentality that is well aware that not only is the Pill (and other contraceptives) not a panacea, but that it has terrible side effects that wreck the physical, mental, social, relational, and spiritual state of women and families, and thus is bad for society at large.

DMC Pharmacy, one of the rare contraception-free pharmacies in the United States, near Washington, DC, has closed its doors effective two days ago due to lack of customer and financial support. CNA covers the story here.

This is so sad and frustrating on several levels. It takes so much courage and sacrifice to make the decision to go against the grain and do the right thing, and to not be supported on principal by two large parishes (totaling 20,000+ parishioners!) says a lot about those parishes. I mean, I’m taking a leap on my inference here, but I find it hard to believe that two parishes really living their faith could not find it in themselves to help a brutha out. But this is the DC area. I used to live in the DC area, and though the DC area is a quasi-mecca for a cluster of super faithful, rock solid Christians, the Catholic population is notably unfaithful in the area of contraception and related issues especially. Boo, those two parishes. (I could be wrong about the parishes, but it just doesn’t add up.)

Which begs the question, how can pro-fertility, pro-family communities (especially faith communities support their local pharmacies? (To find a contraception-free pharmacy, start here. There’s not that many listed, but I know there’s got to be a lot more. If you know of one, connect them with OMS so they can get listed!)

• Make sure that they have NFP information, brochures and flyers at the pharmacy. (General NFP/ Contraception Side Effects brochures available at One More Soul. Specific ones about classes in your area can be found through your Catholic Diocesan Family Life Offices, or local NFP Chapters.) If you’re an NFP Instructor/ Promoter, this is a must!
• Get bulletin announcements published in your church bulletin! We absolutely need to be supporting our brothers and sisters for making courageous decisions. Ask the Family Life/ Respect Life Office to email a bulletin announcement about your local non-contraceptive pharmacy (word the announcement as you wish for maximum effect in your area) to all local parishes. They should have a blanket email list. If they don’t, submit a hard copy for mailing/ newsletters. If this isn’t an option, consider contacting your pastor to suggest this. If he’s on board enough (he should be!), he may even go further and include it in a homily! (It can and does happen.)
• Put flyers up in your church/ supportive community: It’s psychologically shown in marketing/ communications studies that someone has to see/ hear something 5-8 times before remembering it, and having it sink in. That’s why the same commercials are shown over and over, and this is why any publicity should contain several types of media (print, verbal announcement/ radio, email/ internet, etc.) This can get expensive quick, but it also can be done on the cheap. So put up flyers for the pharmacy at your parish (make sure to ask permission–it should be fine, though). With the same redundancy reasoning, also consider:
• Putting a link for the pharmacy’s web site on your parish site/ personal site.
• Spread the word via social networking: Facebook, Twitter, Newsvine, etc.
• Invite the pharmacist to speak: The pharmacist/ pharmacy owner likely has a story on what lead them to take this leap. Their decision is a huge witness in and of itself, and they should be invited to tell their story. Places where they could speak: your local Respect Life Group, a local Catholic Medical Association (or other like-minded medical groups), a youth group, a local Medical Student Group, and others. Mike Koelzer, a pharmacist in Michigan, has got his own site for this purpose! If you’re in Michigan, give Mike a call!
• Pray for Pharmacists who still prescribe BC, and give them this pamphlet on discontinuing contraceptives if they are believers.

What are some of your ideas? Do you have a pharmacist in your area that’s not listed at OMS? Let me know!

Mr. Dal Broi, chemist with courage

If you live anywhere near East Griffith NSW (west of Syndey and north of Melbourne, I think) in Australia, bring your prescription to Trevor Dal Broi, one of many chemists (pharmacists) whose personal and moral beliefs (which happen to be religious) forbid him for prescribing contraception of any kind.

This, of course, makes him the enemy of many whose secular devotion to contraception, sprinkled with a little anti-Christian prejudice, is a kind of tyrrany over a person’s right to exercise their conscience and religion.

According to an Australian blogger from the same town of some 16,000 residents, there are about five pharamacies serving the town, which isn’t exactly depriving the fair citizenry of their compacts of carcinogens.

My favorite quote is from Miss Alison Dance, 18, who believes it’s wrong for someone to exercise their conscience. My guess is that 1) She’s never actually read the pamphlet inside her Pill packet or researched the drawbacks of condom usage; 2) She’s not thought more than 30 seconds about her attitudes and beliefs about sex and contraception, and 3) She feels inconvenienced because someone else has spent more than 30 seconds critically thinking about it, making her ride her bike six more blocks.

According to Freerebulic.com, Mr. Dal Broi will contineu to prescribe contraception that is needed for medical reasons.

The best quote comes from Bob Laird, executive director of another pharmacy, via the Catholic News Agency,

“Birth control is not good health care.  Birth control makes healthy reproductive organs sick and prevents the marital act from completion.  This is not healthcare.  Birth control is a lifestyle choice…”

Amen. Contraception is a lifestyle choice. Some feel it’s more essential than others, but I advocate the ability to make that choice or choose to advocate non-contraceptive family planning, as Mr. Dal Broi does.

Last note: The Catherine of Siena Institute has a great blog post on this story, and ends by encouraging people to support other people who make couragous decisions based on their convictions.

I support Trevor Dal Broi.

However, our friends at Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals are so concerned about women’s wellness with completely altruistic motives that they have created a birth control, evidently, with no side effects. Amazing, right!? OMG, as the kids say. Why is this not on the front page of every paper and being quoted on every blog? I mean, by the way their product was marketed, it looks like not only will it cure my PMS but it might even stop global warming, create the perfect bra, *and* discover who really killed JFK. Nobel Peace Prize, watch out!

Wait a second…I didn’t read the fine print at the bottom of the page, in light gray. Way to go, marketing professionals at Bayer. Turns out, not only did the FDA read the fine print, they realized Yaz wasn’t FDA approved to cure everything. Not only that, but the FDA in concert with attorneys general of 27 states (um, why not 50?) have required Bayer to run $20 Million worth of new advertising over the next six years correcting the misleading advertisements, explaining that women shouldn’t take Yaz just to correct their acne.

Right. Because Yaz is the first birth control brand to promise things either they couldn’t deliver or that mislead consumers. The only one. How many teens are on the Pill because they’ve got acne or 32 day periods or cramps?

This isn’t the first warning for Bayer. They bought the makers of Yasmin, the predecessor to Yaz, who were warned in 2003 for implying in their advertising that their BC was superior to all other pills, and maximizing the positive side effects while minimizing the potentially dangerous side effects.

Right now I’m thinking of a certain Dr. E in Austin Powers saying, “Twenty meeelllyon dollars,” thinking that the world million will knock us off our rockers. I’m thinking that’s not enough, and somebody else agrees,

Bruce L. Lambert, a professor of pharmacy administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago, lauded the F.D.A. for insisting this time that Bayer run a corrective advertising campaign. But he referred to the corrective $20 million ad campaign for Yaz as “chump change” and “just the cost of doing business.”

“I don’t think it is likely to stop,” he said, “unless there are more significant consequences.” (NY Times Advertising Section, 2/11/09)

What is a more significant consequence? Death perhaps? Probably not, since a number of women have already died as a result of using the patch and other birth controls. Did you know the makers of the patch continue to settle out of court with families? What’s 1.25 million times ten to a multi-billion dollar industry? That’s right, Mr. Lambert. Chump change.

I will close with the great wisdom of  lady doctors. Doctors of comedy, that is.

I’ve mentioned the Pill-polution dilemma before, but here’s the practical side of things thanks to the Fish & Wildlife Service and the American Pharmacist Association, aptly titled Smart Disposal (with the “r” in smart as the prescriptive “rx”–so clever). Check out the link above for a how to video, as well as posters, pamphlets and web banners. Spread the news!

Down the Hatch!

I’m filing this one under “Hello, McFly.”

This seems to be news to some– though sadly not on the radar of many–but Dr. Chris Kahlenborn has been saying this for years: taking synthetic hormones, namely hormonal replacement pills and oral contraceptives, for a sustained period of time greatly increases a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.

At the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium this past Saturday, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles presented the results of the study sponsored by the Women’s Health Initiative. The AP reported,

“Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.”

While the researchers emphasize that the pill use should be avoided if possible, they admit that some menopausal symptoms may be so severe that a short term risk may be worth taking hormonal replacement therapy, as long as the dose is as low as possible and continued for a short duration.

Now we can’t play chicken little every time a new study comes out, but when the sample size of a study is so large, and the results are published without a lot of controversy in the medical community (this isn’t the only litmus test, because certainly there’s a lot of valid claims that are disputed by the establishment), it makes one wonder.

It makes me wonder why nobody is connecting this to oral contraceptives? Is it about the machine of so called “big pharma”? Is it because of a cultural pride that refuses to black list the Pill because it was the so-called liberator of the sexual revolution? As contemporary sociologists have shown, most of the promises of the sexual revolution were empty, and the weapons of revolution like the Pill, have only served to contribute to the divorce explosion of the seventies, higher rates of single parenthood, low levels of participatory fathers, increased levels of delinquency–and the poor and minorities have paid the heaviest price.

This isn’t about having an axe to grind–it’s about waking up! When are we going to give up our political pride and social hubris and realize that contaceptives, and in a particular way, oral contraceptives, have not done women, families and society any favors? Janet Smith says this issue is a time bomb waiting to explode, another Big Tobacco waiting to happen, and it will only be a matter of time.

If you’re not convinced, here’s some simple suggestions for your journey to a fuller truth about the ills of synthetic hormones:

• Read Kahlenborn’s, “Breast Cancer,” and see what you think. It’s only $6. That’s a couple coffees, or the price of tampons. You can do it.
•  Listen to Janet Smith’s “Contraception: Why Not.” Distributed a million times over, this can’t just be the enthusiasm of so-called “fundies.” I prefer the revised edition because she draws from a lot of science and anthropology.
• Google “birth control” and “lawsuit”
• Read “Protecting the Pill” by Carolyn Moynihan

If you’re convinced, on board and passionate about this message, I encourage you to:

• Stop taking contraceptives if you are, for the sake of your soul, mind, body and family. Take an NFP class.
• Give informative brochures away, leave them in bathrooms, or perhaps more creatively, put them in envelopes when you pay your bills (if your’e still paying by snail mail)!
• Give out copies of “Contraception: Why Not” revised edition. They’re cheap when you order them in quantity! Make sure these are in your church foyer, especially if you’re Catholic.
• Educate medical professionals you know with the recommended resources, and ask informed medical professionals who are convinced of this message to coach you how to speak to other doctors about this.
• Print out copies of these studies and give them to your physicians and pharmacists.

Spread the message! Link to this post, and work for the true dignity of women and families. Contraception divides families and poisons women. It’s not worth the risk.

A brief video from Rome Reports on the Pope’s aforementioned meeting with the Pharmacists from around the world.

Memo to Politicians of the State of Wisconsin and New Jersey (and, well, the rest of the country, really): Evidently the biomedical services are at the service of man (read: English vernacular for human kind, not a misogynist omission of the feminine genius), not the other way around.

That crazy intellectual giant Benedict is at it again. Human dignity this, conscience that, blah blah blah. Will he ever quit? (No.)

In a brief talk he gave to the International Federation of Catholic Pharmacists yesterday, Pope Benedict urged pharmacists to be particularly sensitive to “the ethical implications of the use of particular drugs.”

He went on to say “we cannot anesthetize consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person’s life.”

Get out. So like, we can’t compartmentalize our faith, and check our conscience at the door to the lab? Whaaat? How are pharmacists and doctors going to survive in a pill-centered society? Perhaps Christian and Catholic Medical Professionals should compromise their faith? Oops. Yeah, there’s a few of those out there. Maybe crawl under the rug?

Or maybe, just maybe, they could take  up their cross and answer the couragous call to be Pro Life and Pro Fertility professionals? (That’s a lot of pros). Do we have pro life, pro fertility medical professionals in Wisconsin? You bet. Here too.