PQ #26 - Fertility Awareness and Re-Thinking the Pill - With Dr Karla Polaschek, OB/GYN

PastoralQuotient

My guest on this episode is a physician, an OBGYN who has cared for thousands of women and delivered thousands of their babies during her twenty years of practice. In many ways, she is a typical obstetrician. But there is a significant twist. Dr Karla Polaschek decided twenty years ago that she would not do tubal ligations or, perhaps more surprisingly, prescribe the Pill. For the he 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, I thought, rather than rehashing arguments about contraception, why not find someone who actually has rigorously thought through and accepted HV and its implications, someone who is operating at a very high professional level, and specializes in caring for women and their fertility, and who in fact is a woman herself? So that’s what I did. In this interview, I speak with Karla about her journey towards medicine, her return to the faith after a lukewarm adolescence and young adulthood, her growth as a maturing disciple of Jesus, and her decision to opt out of prescribing the pill in favor of a more holistic approach to fertility awareness.