Contraception and maternity services are seperate from the main services a GP provides, though. No GP is required to provide contraceptive services. Most, but not all, do it, as they get paid for it, but there is no legal requirement for any GP to provide contraception. You can sign on with any practice for your contraceptive services and some surgeries specialise in this.
I had a great chat with my dh about this after the children went to bed tonight. He is very happy in his position that he is not required to refer for abortion under the legal situation of the Abortion Act and any rewriting of that Act is bound to include another conscience clause. If a woman in his surgery wants the morning after pill, his partner will prescribe it. He also does not refer for abortion but the woman is fully counselled about how to access the service and can sign on with another practice, about 45 mins away. Yes it seems far but people here will make that trip to visit the dentist or do their shopping (closest supermarket), and the termination would be carried out at the hospital which is in the same town. Part and parcel of rural life!
My dh provides a same day appointment for all patients who wish to be seen, for whatever reason. He still provides an on-call service staffed by the doctors who work in the practice, not a cooperative, or on call centre. He does not provide all services, no doctor does. His example - he cannot do joint injections, which can be very important to people who suffer from arthritis. People in his practice who need them have to go to the outpatient clinic for the steroid injection. My own practice (we are registered seperately) does not provide coil fitting - I had to go tot he family planning clinic to have a new mirena inserted a few weeks ago. Its just the way things are. If you live where we do, you cannot have a home birth, no matter how much you want it, as there are not local doctors who offer intrapartum care. But it is unlikely that many people on Mumsnet could expect the kind of 'home hospice' care that my dh and his partner provide, allowing people to die with dignity in their own homes.
He also said that there is actually a very low demand for the services which he doesnt provide. In the last year he has seen one patient who wanted a termination, and she was understanding of his views (which are widely known in the community, we live within the practice area and are well known locally). He doesn't have to refer patients who want the morning after pill to his partner very often at all.
Dh has thought all this through in great detail. He agonises over decisions like this. He has to make decisions about life and death on a daily basis, between caring for pregnant women (and no, he doesn't beleive in sex before marriage but provides a full and caring service to unmarried pregnant women) to choosing between two badly injured people at a road accident, (he could only treat one of them at a time when he happened across them earlier this year), to sitting down as he has had to do in the last week and explain to a man who's wife is dying of breast cancer that his 'bad chest' is also cancer, and probably inoperable. There is SO much more to being a GP and providing a good service to the community than whether or not you refer for termination of pregnancy. To say that someone who wont do that, but does all the other things that my dh does, is not fit to be a doctor paid by the NHS is frankly offensive. I'm sure almost all of you, who live where you have to wait to see a doctor, and those of you who have to phone NHS 24 for advice because you can never get through to the surgery, and those of you whos doctor will never do a house call, would love to have the service that my dh provides on a daily basis, regardless of his views on abortion.
Thats where we are coming from on this.