Birth Control

Roman Catholic clergy in Baltimore have expressed concern over the city Health Department's recent decision to distribute birth control pills and condoms at seven public middle and high schools.The open letter sent Tuesday to Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke was signed by 28 clergymen and one nun, Sister Jane Doyle, the pastoral director of Corpus Christi parish in Bolton Hill. The signers were convened by Auxiliary Bishop John Ricard, urban vicar of Baltimore's Catholic Archdiocese.The signers wrote that the department's action "ignores the very personhood of our young people, by failing to recognize them as persons who must learn to make responsible moral decisions.

Molly Kelly has nothing against sex, she will tell you. After all, she has eight children.But the sexual abstinence guru told Arundel High School students that safe-sex lectures often fail to discuss the one birth control method that that is free and foolproof: chastity."

WASHINGTON -- Most minority women never use birth control and erroneously believe they are not at risk for AIDS, according to a groundbreaking survey released yesterday.In addition, fewer than half say they could easily obtain an abortion if they should choose to have one, according to the poll conducted for the National Council of Negro Women and the Communications Consortium Media Center in Washington.The survey probed the attitudes of black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian women on reproductive health-care issues and found that they felt "undervalued, underserved, underinsured and under the gun," said Dorothy I. Height, president and chief executive officer of the NCNW.

WOMAN OF VALOR:MARGARET SANGER AND THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT IN AMERICA.Ellen Chesler.Simon & Schuster.640 pages. $27.50. Eighteen, unmarried and in need of contraceptives in 1962, I had no idea about the struggle for birth control described in this book, or the existence of an early 20th century feminist movement, or what the forces were that determined that a middle-class young woman like myself had nowhere to go for reproductive advice in the largest city...

While contraceptives might seem readily available almost anywhere today, many health insurance plans actually do not include coverage of birth control, or neglect to give information about the coverage they provide.A new study says managed care organizations frequently offer no such coverage out of a misplaced concern about costs."It's undeniable that for an insurer to pay for pregnancy is many, many, many times more expensive than paying for contraception," said Rachel Gold, a researcher with the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a family planning research and advocacy organization that sponsored the study.

SAN FRANCISCO - Catholic Charities must include contraceptives in its employee prescription drug coverage, even though the church believes birth control is sinful, the California Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The 6-1 ruling came in a case that has been watched around the country as a contest between advocates of making contraceptives widely available to women and religious groups that have sought broad exemptions based on their faiths. California is one of 20 states that require employers offering prescription drug benefits to also provide contraceptive coverage.

TOKYO -- This land of high tech and recurring health fads is preparing, with no little trepidation, for a medical invention the rest of the industrialized world adopted three decades ago.The pill, the small hormone tablet that has been profoundly changing both personal lives and national population curves in other societies since the 1960s, is expected to get Ministry of Health approval later this year for use as a means of birth control.Akira Kawahara, assistant director of the ministry's New Drugs Division, said last week that the first pills could be on the market by late 1991.

DENVER -- At least once a day, a teenage girl walks into North High School's health clinic, wanting to find out if she's pregnant. Frequently, it turns out that she is. With the city's teen birth rate more than double the statewide rate of 24.3 births per 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 17, Denver school officials are considering a proposal to dispense contraceptives in six school-based health clinics that serve the district's most impoverished students....

The Food and Drug Administration swept away decades of controversy yesterday by approving the drug Depo Provera for use as an injectable contraceptive that gives three months of birth control with each shot.Immediately, family planning doctors hailed the action, predicting that it will be embraced by hundreds of thousands of U.S. women eager for a long-term contraceptive that requires no maintenance except a new injection every 90 days."I think it's a tremendous step forward," said Dr. Edward Wallach, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The Food and Drug Administration swept away decades of controversy yesterday by approving the drug Depo Provera for use as an injectable contraceptive for women that gives three months of birth control with each shot.Family planning doctors hailed the action, predicting that it will be embraced by hundreds of thousands of U.S. women eager for a long-term contraceptive that requires no maintenance except a new injection every 90 days."I think it's a tremendous step forward," said Dr. Edward Wallach, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.