Pope Francis has indicated that women exposed to the Zika virus may be permitted to use contraception to avoid pregnancy, in a departure from Catholic teaching.
Natural Family Planning NFPP) is often associated with FAM, and specifically refers to forms of contraception permitted by the Roman Catholic Church.
Speaking to reporters aboard his flight from Mexico's Ciudad Juarez to Rome, Francis was asked if a "lesser evil" — abortion or contraception — could be permitted to prevent the disease from harming a fetus.
Although the Affordable Care Act requires health insurance companies to offer no-cost birth control, it doesn't require them to cover every form of contraception, and it permits them to levy copayments and other charges to certain types, as they do with other medications and procedures.
Control subjects were not permitted concomitant medications, apart from hormonal contraception.
Female subjects of childbearing potential were required to use adequate contraception and were not permitted to breastfeed while on the study.
(The best that the church has managed to come up with by way of reform of its social doctrine is to "permit" the use of condoms — not for contraception, but in cases where one partner in a married couple is H.I.V.-positive, to prevent the spread of the disease).
Bowing to the political and religious right, the Food and Drug Administration dawdles over granting women over-the-counter access to the morning-after emergency contraceptive known as Plan B. This triumph of ideology over science is the impetus for important legislation pending in Albany that would permit pharmacists in New York State to dispense emergency contraception.
Arizona is one of six states that permit pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception drugs, like Plan B, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
However, it permits women to control fertility by using natural methods of contraception, based on menstrual cycles.
