This is shocking. Despite being available secular and Catholic hospitals, 40% of Connecticut's rape victims are not offered Plan B emergency contraception when they have rape examinations. What are the hospitals waiting for?
Even as the Plan B emergency birth control pill was heading toward more widespread availability at pharmacy counters, 40 percent of rape victims who sought care at Connecticut hospitals in the first half of 2006 were not offered the medication or were sent home without the full dose of the drug needed to prevent pregnancy, rape counselors say.
The continuing reluctance of hospitals - both Catholic and secular - to dispense the pills has prompted women's advocates to once again push the legislature to pass a law requiring all hospitals to provide the pill as a routine part of rape examinations.
Women aren't being offered the treatment they need or even the correct treatment when they do get it. Some Catholic hospitals are resisting the legislative push on the grounds that it would violate their freedom of religion. Apparently the freedom of religion now includes the right to deliberately misunderstand how a medical treatment works.
Jennifer Barrows, a spokeswoman for the Connecticut Hospital Association... said that the association, which represents the state's 31 hospitals, has not taken a position on the Plan B issue because the Catholic hospitals are members and asked that the trade group remain neutral.
Although there is some uncertainty about exactly how the Plan B pill works, church leaders contend that hormones in the drug could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, an event they equate with abortion.
But medical experts say that the hormones in the pills more likely prevent pregnancy by delaying or preventing ovulation.
I'm sure rape victims around Connecticut will be sure to thank Hartford Courant reporter Hilary Waldman for her balanced presentation of church leaders' profound misunderstanding of how emergency contraception works and why it's contraception. The uncertainty as to how Plan B works resides solely with the anti-abortion activists who falsely believe that this form of contraception is somehow an abortion. This misrepresentation, as characterized by Waldman, is clearly based on a false understanding of how the female reproductive organs are laid out and how the process of fertilization takes place.
There are many reasons to require that Plan B be a mandatory part of every rape examination in Connecticut. It's criminally unfair to ask rape victims to remember to ask for emergency contraception - many people don't know how Plan B works and as Connecticut's church leaders show, many have the false impression that taking Plan B equates to having an abortion. Plan B works best when taken closely after intercourse; giving it at a hospital during a rape exam is likely the earliest point when it can be provided to most rape victims. Delaying taking emergency contraception any later than during the exam raises the risk of making the drug ineffective. Women under eighteen can't buy Plan B over the counter, but they can get it at hospitals; mandating emergency contraception in rape exams would ensure that minors are not at greater risk for being impregnated as the result of a rape. Lastly, because the state of Connecticut reimburses hospitals for every pill of Plan B that they dispense (while it could cost women $60 to buy the pill on their own), it saves rape victims from deciding whether or not they can afford to to take emergency contraception.
The need to mandate that Connecticut's hospitals provide rape victims with emergency contraception is clear. Let's push Democrats to get behind Senator Mary Ann Handle's (D-Manchester) bill that accomplishes this sensible goal.
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