For anyone with an ounce of compassion, emergency contraception for rape victims should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, however, we’re dealing with the Bush/Ashcroft Justice Department.
The Justice Department has issued its first-ever medical guidelines for treating sexual-assault victims — without mention of emergency contraception, the standard precaution against pregnancy after rape.
Omission of the so-called morning-after pill has frustrated and angered victims’ advocates and medical professionals.
Dems argue that preventing unwanted pregnancies would reduce the number of abortions. Republicans, particularly in the Bush administration, don’t care. They’re against abortion and against taking any steps — emergency contraception, accurate education on sexual health, support for family planning programs — that might make abortions less common, even for women who’ve been assaulted.
Gail Burns-Smith, one of several dozen experts who vetted the protocol during its three-year development by Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, said emergency contraception was included in an early draft, and she does not know of anyone who opposed it.
“But in the climate in which we are currently operating, politically it’s a hot potato,” said Burns-Smith, retired director of Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services.
True, but it’s also the climate in which there are more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions. The Bush administration is pursuing an agenda that gives them more of what they say they don’t want.
Naturally, Bush’s base is thrilled.
“I think it’s very smart not to put that in the guidelines,” said Dr. George Isajiw, a board member of Physicians for Life, a Philadelphia anti-abortion group.
By giving emergency contraception, he said, “you’re giving a dangerous drug that’s not doing any good, or else you’re causing an abortion. As a moral principle, a woman has the right to defend herself against an aggressor. But she doesn’t have the right to kill the baby.”
If only Isajiw realized how wrong he is. Emergency contraception — nothing more than high-dose birth-control pills — reduces the chance of pregnancy 75 to 90 percent, but only if taken within 72 hours of sex. By using the contraception, the pregnancy process is interrupted. Isajiw and Bush’s Justice Department prefer a system whereby the rape victim misses the opportunity to take advantage of emergency contraception, becomes pregnant, and will likely consider terminating the pregnancy with an abortiom, which conservatives claim to oppose.
This is the logic embraced in Bush’s “compassionate” America.