Abstract

In 1997 the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain published a report entitledFrom Compliance to Concordance: Achieving Shared Goals in Medicine Taking. This article applies this new model—of doctors and patients working together towards a shared goal—to the prescribing of hormonal forms of contraception. It begins by critically evaluating the current dominant model of contraceptive prescribing. It claims that this model tends to stereotype all women, but particularly young, poor and black women, as unreliable and ill-informed contraceptors who need to be advised and even controlled by much more knowledgeable and socially responsible family planning experts. The article then suggests how a much more egalitarian model of contraceptive prescribing might be put into practice, whilst acknowledging the existence of many serious obstacles to such a radical shift within family planning services. In conclusion, the article suggests that until contraceptive prescribers begin to take women’s experiences of, and concerns about, hormonal contraceptives seriously they will fail to develop a potentially much more effective and liberating model of family planning.