One of the reasons the wingnuts give for demanding an ultrasound is to verify gestational age (because, y’know, a woman having a first-trimester abortion wold have no idea of which period she missed). So really the matching legislation should require laboratory verification of ED, rather than self-report.

The other thing that’s at least a little interesting to me is that a significant fraction of ED is (in theory at least) traceable to the kinds of “lifestyle” underlying conditions that usually get conservatives frothing about how other people don’t deserve treatment for diseases that they brought on themselves. But everyone in the ED ads is trim, young-looking and clearly works out several times a week, and hence doesn’t “deserve” to suffer.

I’m a guy who agrees with you completely about this. However, I’d like to add that sometimes men can’t get ED drugs either, at least not enough. I had surgery for prostate cancer in July—I’m completely cancer-free now—and part of the therapy is a daily dose of Cialis to encourage blood flow in the area.  However, my insurance company will only allow me to have 16 pills every 25 days. My doctor, aware of this nonsense, told me to go to an online Canadian pharmacy to get the drug without insurance. Since Canada has only generic drugs, the cost was $28 for 30 pills versus $140 for brand name Cialis in the US.

Mike—and there are women who need BCP to manage their hormones. They’re not the majority of users obviously, but you always get a hue and cry whenever talk of making BCP harder to get from women who want to reassure everyone that they’re good girls and need the meds for their acne or their crazy monster periods and not at all for dirty fucking like those sluts.

The idea that anyone, man or woman, would have to pass some sort of moral litmus test to get access to their prescription medications is nonsense.

It shouldn’t matter why you need Cialis. The drug exists, it has multiple uses and benefits, and if the doctor says “ok sure you should be on it,” then that should really be the end of the discussion.

Why always the converted former hedonists who ruined it for everyone?  Saul/Paul, Augustine…

Your analysis is correct.  ED is “natural” and avoiding pregnancy is natural too.  The ability to reliably control fertility has been the greatest boon to women ever (which is why the forces of malignant Patriarchy are so dead set against it).

But invoking the “apostle” Paul (who never actually met Jesus, let alone followed him) is sickening.  That one man had more to do with taking whatever good could have been found in early Christianity and smothering it out of existence than any other single person.  His legacy of twisted misogyny plagues us to this day.  What a sick man and what a malignant set of accomplishments to leave behind…

paul, what’s funny about that is doctors already use ultrasound to determine gestational age, which determines what abortion method to use. They just do it in a swift manner that’s as non-intrusive as possible. The laws that antis are pushing now are about making it last. Often, the ultrasound that they’re requiring is on top of the one the doctor was already going to perform, meaning that there’s two. But it also often requires a vaginal probe to get a more clear picture of the embryo, etc. The point is making sure you’re poked and prodded as much as possible.

@MikeEss:

I’m not sure about that. On the one hand, he was a nasty busybody before he fell off his horse, and then a nasty busybody after, but the classical world was bleeping full of people who had visions, and only a few of them got immediately accepted as arbiters of the faith. Early christianity was full of what church historians are pleased to call doctrinal disagreements instead of political infighting, and the fact that that paul’s epistles are in the canon instead of having gone right from opening into the cloaca is more about who won those fights than paul himself.

(And, not surprisingly, we could have done worse. One of the competing doctrines was a sort of modified FLDS-style patriarchy, with every congregation’s priest as his own Koresh.)

My impression is that Paul was writing from a belief that Jesus would be returning within their lifetimes, so having children was pointless. As such, the only reason to have sex was basically recreational. But of course as you said, Paul basically says that you should just do without unless you’re blue-balling like crazy. (Yes, I realize that’s male-centric, but that’s because this is Paul we’re talking about here.)

This is why I prefer your sex-positive Christians. They do exist.

Make men get permission from their wives for viagra. If they’re going to put patronizing hoops in place for women to jump through…

Fundies ignoring that their god probably wouldn’t be too keen on Viagra

This is an outrageous falsehood.

Fundies know damn well that Rush got busted with the Big V on his way back from the Dominican Republican.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/27/national/main1753947.shtml

Jeezus!

“The argument is that erectile dysfunction is a condition that needs to be cured, but since pregnancy is “natural” (actually, so is erectile dysfunction, as it’s often just part of aging), preventing it is dirty slutdom.”

Yeah, funny how ED isn’t considered a divine sign that The Natural Order Of Things dictates that you shouldn’t be 60 years old and chasing a toddler around.

Yeah, funny how ED isn’t considered a divine sign that The Natural Order Of Things dictates that you shouldn’t be 60 years old and chasing a toddler around.
Comment #11: RickMassimo on 01/31 at 12:59 PM

Don’t be silly, Daddy doesn’t have to chase toddlers unless he wants to.  Women are the ones who have the expiry date.

Paul’s uneasiness with sex still permeates the Catholic Church hierarchy, plenty of Protestant denominations, and lots of individual Christians.  They simply do not think that most sex is a good thing (OK for procreation; maybe OK between married people), although plenty of them sure think it’s fun—that is, it is a “temptation” to be resisted.

This attitude leads to, among many other things, a LOT of angst regarding what counts as “sex.”  Is holding hands or kissing OK?  How about touching and fondling?  Oral?  Anal?  No orgasm?  If the real belief is that PIV is something special between a married man and woman, then all the other stuff should be OK, but you don’t hear conservative Christians advocating it.  On the other hand, if all sexual touching is wrong, then, kissing is off the table, and only the most conservative Christians would take that position.

All of which is to say that a big chunk of what we have here is a distrust/fear of sex.  (And THAT comes in no small part from a distrust/fear of women.)

@Mighty Ponygirl: Very true. There are plenty of diseases and other conditions that are natural that we still try to treat. Cancer can occur naturally, but you don’t see many Chrisitian’s claiming that chemotherapy is an abomination unto the Lord. And on the less serious side, plenty of people suffer from poor vision and male pattern baldness, but no one has a moral opposition to glasses or plugs (although I am opposed to bad toupees).

@ganews @4 - No one’s more zealous than a convert.  Only Augustine was an ex-hedonist, though.  Saul/Paul was more of an inquisitor, persecuting early Christians before his own conversion.  As far as we can tell, he was always an ascetic.

Under the “You first, Asshole” Doctrine, any person who invokes “It’s natural” as an excuse to limit or eliminate birth control and abortion will be subject to the Naturalness Police for a period of 5 years before they are allowed to enforce rules onto others. The Naturalness Police will accompany them on every doctor and hospital visit to ensure they aren’t getting anything unnatural - like all medical help for any ailment or injury.

“You broke your arm and it can be fixed? Oh well! God obviously wanted your arm broken or it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe you shouldn’t have been horsing around so much.
You got an STD and now you want medication? Sorry! That’s unnatural. You might as well make the best of it. Go ahead and make lemonade out of those lemons!
You are predisposed to get a disease and there is a way to prevent it? Too bad! Nature must take it’s course in your body. Maybe if you pray hard enough God will miraculously spare you. If you still get the disease after that, you probably deserved it. Besides, we don’t want all these people walking around free, happy, and without worry if we allow them to be escape a bad possibility in their life.”

@MikeEss @5 - If we’re talking about people who strangled what good there might have been in early Christianity, I would personally vote for Constantine over Paul.  Paul might have reinforced the early church’s misogyny and sex-negativity (perhaps already present in a small cult dedicated to giving up all earthly treasures in preparating for the coming Kingdom), but it was Constantine that turned it from an organization of the poor and downtrodden into an Institution with secular power, which power they’ve been working to expand and retain ever since.

@annabanana: you should ct them a little break. They can take willow bark and poppy extract for pain, and you can splint their arms with a stick, just as long as you don’t x-ray first to make sure the bones are aligned. But municipal water and pasteurized milk are right out, as is anything that needs freezing or refrigeration, unless they do it seasonally.

You’re talking about people who cite one part of Leviticus for why homosexuality is bad while also eating cheeseburgers and wearing mixed fabrics. Selective reading is what they’re all about.

@Paul,
Sure, I guess those few exceptions can be allowed. LOL!

One of the reasons the wingnuts give for demanding an ultrasound is to verify gestational age….

As Amanda already mentioned, this forced intervention has nothing to do with the medical test know as ultrasound. It has no medical indication (you cannot mandate a test for EGA without data that 1) it’s necessary, 2) a preexisting test just doesn’t count). It has no established technique (a medical U/S is more than just inserting a probe and moving it about. What structures do you look at? How? Why? For how long?). It has no parameters. (What are “normal” values and why? How do the findings relate to the outcome?).

And last, but not least, it’s not a medical test because it does not require a patient’s consent. With the exception of medical emergencies, you need a patient’s consent to perform a medical test. With these forced interventions, even if the patient tells you she does not want the test, you still have to perform it, against her wishes, in order for her to be able to receive proper medical care.

These gentlemen who suffer from ED should see it as a gift from God - a “broken” gift, certainly, but a gift nonetheless.  They should be thankful and accept this broken gift, and not try to go against God’s will for them.

Jesus, these folks are using religion as a cover for a deep-set misogyny.

“I know.  And think I thought crucifixion was painful . . . .”

Oops: “And [to] think I thought crucifixion was painful . . . .”

If I understand all of these correctly, from the fundie point of view men should be having more sex, and women should be having less. Seems pretty clear that the solution to this is more gay sex.

They’re not the majority of users obviously, but you always get a hue and cry whenever talk of making BCP harder to get from women who want to reassure everyone that they’re good girls and need the meds for their acne or their crazy monster periods and not at all for dirty fucking like those sluts.

Mighty Ponygirl, that’s not the impression I’ve ever gotten from people saying that.  The point is that those medications serve many purposes for women’s health which banning them disregards.  And if you made exceptions for the people with health needs other than not becoming pregnant like acne or painful periods which can be subjective, nearly everyone who wanted it would qualify.  It’s an additional argument in favor of available birth control, not that some of us just don’t fuck (plenty of ladies with painful periods do!).

For example, I just started the pill again because I may have endometriosis.  I don’t need it to prevent pregnancy because I already had a Mirena when I got this news.  The idea that I should go through routine excruciating pain, damage to the internal structures of my body, and surgery for a problem that can recur is scary enough on its own.  And it illustrates the point that people who want to restrict access to birth control don’t just want to prevent women from having healthy sexualities—they are also fine with preventing us from having healthy bodies, full stop.

These gentlemen who suffer from ED should see it as a gift from God - a “broken” gift, certainly, but a gift nonetheless.  They should be thankful and accept this broken gift, and not try to go against God’s will for them.

I saw what you did there ...

Over at Rod Dreher’s blog he has a post about how Obama is going to lose all the Catholics because of the birth control decision.  I weighed in that almost all the practicing Catholics I know use BC - my mother used to say “If the pope were a woman, things would be different” - and that the pill has many other uses besides birth control.  Someone who teaches natural family planning, who claims to be a family physician (!) says there are other ways to treat all those conditions.  I asked why someone should have to find a work-around because she disapproves of the pill?  No answer.
And no, I don’t think Obama is going to lose all the Catholics because of this - only the crazy fundamentalist ones who would never vote for him anyway.

Since Canada has only generic drugs, the cost was $28 for 30 pills versus $140 for brand name Cialis in the US.

Yeah, not how that works. Canada has pretty much all the brand name drugs you know and love. And a quick search on Health Canada shows that only Eli Lilly is approved to sell tadalafil in Canada.

So if you’re getting something besides Cialis or Adcirca, you’re getting a drug that isn’t legal to sell in Canada.

This whole discussion hits home with me but from a slightly different angle.  Had to take my 74-year-old Ma to the doc several times over the past couple months. She was losing circulation in her fingertips to the point they were turning blue.  Turns out she has what’s called Raynaud’s phenomenon [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raynaud’s_phenomenon ] and one of the drugs the doctor prescribed for her was Viagra (for the circulatory benefits). 

Once we got over the hilarity of this little old lady—widowed, mind you—walking into a pharmacy to fill a Viagra prescription, for herself, we got down to the drudgery of dealing with her insurance company to pay for the treatment. 

Turns out they won’t cover Viagra for 74-year-old women because they will only pay for Viagra to treat ED, not Raynaud’s.  WTF?  For my Mom to buy the pills out of pocket domestically was going to cost something to the tune of about $12,000/year.  The doctor suggested she call Canada, which we did, and now she’s getting her daily dosage of Viagra for somewhere in the neighborhood of about $1000/yr.

And that’s our health care system in a nutshell.

Over on Slacktivist, there’s a body of evidence that Paul wasn’t all that misogynist, but the anti-woman stuff comes from letters dubiously linked to him. He has evidence in the earlier books of Paul explicitly sending out female missionaries and speaking quite highly of them. In one instance, later authors actually change the name of one to make her male, which is an obvious fraud as the masculinized version of the name never occurs outside the one use.

I’d blamed Paul for all the nasty stuff too, but even if he did write what he wrote, Constantine is the real bad guy anyway. Without him, Christianity would not have been tied to government, which would have made it a much more tolerable religion.

Mandatory cardiac exam and prostate check for ED prescriptions should be required, and insurance companies should be required to pay for them.

Why? Because ED complaints are often the first clinical sign that something is going wrong with a man’s cardiovascular health.  Chart review studies have shown that ED ducks its head long before other clinical signs of heart disease are manifest.  If ED compaints triggered a full cardiac workup, we could save a great deal of money on mortality and morbidity.  Huge money and life saving provision.

Prostate check is a no brainer as it may be a cause.

Mandatory cardiac exam and prostate check for ED prescriptions should be required, and insurance companies should be required to pay for them.

Why? Because ED complaints are often the first clinical sign that something is going wrong with a man’s cardiovascular health.  Chart review studies have shown that ED ducks its head long before other clinical signs of heart disease are manifest.  If ED compaints triggered a full cardiac workup, we could save a great deal of money on mortality and morbidity.  Huge money and life saving provision.

Prostate check is a no brainer as it may be a cause.
Comment #32: Ms Kate on 01/31 at 05:44 PM

To what degree should good medical practice be legally defined before the fact?  How would we ever manage it?

I do like your “ducks its head” phrasing.  Heh.

This just in Susan G Komen pulled funding from Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings.

In addition to oldfeminists point in #33:

I feel strongly the need to point out here that even getting any prescribed BIRTH CONTROL usually requires a doctor sticking something in your vagina, as many doctors will not prescribe these various pills/injections/etc. without doing a pap first.  I don’t actually think this is a law anywhere, though it is a recommendation from the AMA and other medical organizations in the US.  And while I agree that cervical cancer is bad and there’s pretty much no other way to detect it (seriously, why has no one managed to come up with something less uncomfortable than a speculum?), a woman should be able to get BCP without a mandatory violating exam if she wants them and understands the risks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/virginia-politics/post/viagra-regs-paired-with-abortion-rules/2012/01/30/gIQAnw5QdQ_blog.html

#32 miss kate - a Virginia State rep thinks like you and added that very requirement - specifying “digital rectal prostate exam” as an amendment to one of those ultrasound abortion bills.  It failed, but not by much.  She said she felt there should be some gender equity.

The doctor suggested she call Canada, which we did, and now she’s getting her daily dosage of Viagra for somewhere in the neighborhood of about $1000/yr.

Isn’t that illegal? Tsk, tsk.

Viagra and birth control for all!

Viagra and birth control for some, miniature American flags for others!

Oldfeminist, that underscores one of the major hypocrisies of the radical right: they try to scare people away from “socialist” medicine because “the goverment will tell your doctor what to do” for the good of all ... but then they put all this non-medical crap on women seeking health care.

Shorter every one of jorge.1991’s comments: “I agree with liberal values on principle, but I’m very concerned about violating some kind of vague natural law.”