The number of "NFP-only" practices is unknown, but an Ohio-based Web site promoting them has a registry of nearly 500 doctors who have pledged to practice this way. Most are obstetrician-gynecologists and family practitioners.
"We’re trying to get doctors to see that contraception is not good medical practice," said Steve Koob, who runs the One More Soul site ( http://www.omsoul.com ). "Natural family planning for couples that need to space their children is as effective, and it builds a marriage."
Doctors on the registry say they converted their practices after struggling to reconcile their beliefs with their medical responsibilities, often after years of being penalized or shunned by colleagues.
"I’ve encountered a lot of resistance to how I practice over the years," said Lorna L. Cvetkovich, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Ann Arbor, Mich. "For one thing, contraception and sterilizations bring in a lot of revenue. But I finally found partners who feel the way I do, and we’re scraping by."
The approach also provides a haven for women who have had a hard time finding a doctor who understands their beliefs.
"What happens is a patient says to her doctor, ‘I don’t want an abortion. I don’t want to go on birth-control pills. I don’t want to create 10 embryos and kill eight of them to have a baby,’ " said Thomas W. Hilgers, who started the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction in Omaha to do research in this area, offer patients alternatives and train doctors. "They end up getting ridiculed or told they are stupid."
A decent story, but as Tim Graham points out at at NRO:
It’s only natural that the story would include critics. The first one is R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, who complains "Welcome to the era of balkanized medicine." (As if there already weren’t alternative medical practices in the left-wing counterculture.) Stein presents Charo as simply a non-ideological critic. Too bad he didn’t mention the left-wing abortion-advocacy credentials from her own biography: a member of the board of Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher Institute and the "National Medical Advisory Committee" of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Perhaps there’s a little ideology in her interpretation, not just a devotion to health care.
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