If you want to see the consequences of the recent wave of attempts to endorse “provider conscience rules”, in which health care providers are permitted to freely exercise their whims and biases in providing clients and patients their services, read this story. As usual, it’s all about controlling the reproductive choices of women: we’ve had politicians blocking access to Plan B contraception; laws that would allow doctors to deny care if it was against their religious beliefs; and pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Beyond simply passive denial of giving a patient what they need, though, we now have gone to the next step: wingnuts actively removing birth control devices against the patient’s will. Nurse practitioner Sylvia Olona of the Presbyterian Medical Services Rio Rancho Family Health Center in New Mexico has been taking it upon herself to yank out the IUDs of patients in her care.

Having the IUD come out was a good thing [because] I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don’t know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them. …What the IUD does is take the fertilized egg and pushes it out of the uterus.

What Olona is doing is a violation of ethics, a consequence of shameful ignorance, and ought to be criminal. At the very least, she ought to be fired.

That is not what an IUD does. An IUD is a small, typically T-shaped piece of metal or plastic that is inserted into the uterus, where it interferes with conception. In essence, what it does is induce a low-grade, local inflammation in the reproductive tract that causes changes in cervical mucus, hindering the passage of sperm. The device itself also seems to block sperm activity, and some IUDs also slowly release progestin, a hormone that suppresses ovulation. It is not an abortifactant. It is basically a kind of barrier method. Most of the uninformed complaints about the IUD are built on the fact that it also induces changes to the uterine lining which would inhibit implantation if sperm somehow managed to fertilize an egg.

How about firing this bozo because she is ignorant about the facts of her job?

Olona is a serial offender. She is currently being sued by a woman who went in for a trivial adjustment of the IUD, and instead had it completely removed by Olona…by ‘accident’, the nurse claims, but she apparently has a reputation for doing this.

Everyone in the office always laughs and tells me I pull these out on purpose because I am against them, but it’s not true, they accidentally come out when I tug.

Ladies, welcome to your future. A future in which others will decide whether you may have children or not. Don’t worry, though: they will never say “not”. And don’t feel like your choices will be taken out of your hands, you still have a choice. If you don’t want to get pregnant, just never have sex, you slut.