The ‘Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies’ Act

June 17, 2005

Earlier this year, in one of the more offensive examples of conservatism lacking compassion, the Bush/Ashcroft Justice Department sought to hide information about emergency contraception for rape victims.

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.

And with good cause. Emergency contraception — nothing more than high-dose birth-control pills — reduces the chance of pregnancy 75 to 90 percent if taken within 72 hours of sex and would, necessarily, lead to fewer abortions. And yet, the Bush gang omitted any reference to emergency contraception in the Justice Department guidelines — even though Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women said emergency contraception was included in an early draft. Right-wing politics drove the information out. For the Bush administration, if that means more rape victims become pregnant, so be it.

Fortunately, a group of senators introduced legislation this week that shows the compassion that the administration rejected.

Three U.S. senators introduced a bill Wednesday that would require hospitals to offer rape victims information and access to emergency contraception.

The “CARE Act” — Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act — also would ensure rape victims receive proper medical care to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. The bill was introduced by Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Jon Corzine, D-N.J., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Snowe said an estimated 300,000 women are the victims of sexual assault each year and about 25,000 women become pregnant from rape. The CARE Act should be a no-brainer policy for everyone.

The question then becomes whether most Republicans in Washington will agree.

Jonathan Cohn, writing about the CARE Act in The New Republic yesterday, asked:

So will the conservatives fight this, too? It seems unfathomable that anybody could deny rape victims a drug that would prevent pregnancy most of the time, just because it might prevent a fertilized egg from implanting (something that happens all the time naturally, by the way). And surely cultural conservatives don’t want to argue that providing emergency contraception to rape victims encourages promiscuity, right?

Just because it’s unfathomable doesn’t mean the conservatives that dominate the GOP won’t try it anyway. We’re talking about a group of people who want to deny young women vaccines against a venereal disease that can cause cervical cancer, so this would be par for the course when it comes to Republicans and sexual health.

Right-wing politics drove the information out.

Amazing how many news items this covers.

  • Well, here goes with another attempt to comment on this post (the first try I failed to include my email address, and when the error page came up, I tried to backspace to the comment page and my entire comment was gone!! Why is that Mr. Carpetbagger? It never happens on any other site, and it’s damned frustrating. 🙁 )

    Anyway, this government action nicely coincides with religiously-affiliated hospitals refusing to tell rape victims that the morning after pills even exist let alone offer them. So now women’s bodies are not only hostage to an unwanted fetus resulting from consentual intercourse, but also hostage to violent sexual preditors, too. What an outrage, but not surprising.

    Women and children have been exploited by the male gender from time immemorial, but are we in this country still so unenlightened that we can permit the abuses to continue unabated, and even promoted, by the very institutions that are designed to protect them (churches, governmental agencies and policies, marriage)? What a shame.

    Without women, men would be complete savages; they make us human, and for most of us they make us humane, too. These people are human beings, for pity’s sake, and they are our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our aunts, and the sole means to perpetuate our very existence.

    Who could blame women for raging against such outrages. I know there are some women who do rage, but they are branded as castrating bitches, or wackos, or simply losers. Yet, as a man, I cannot know the terror of worrying each month “Am I pregnant? Am I not pregnant?”, of worrying about walking alone to my car, of noises outside my apartment at night, of accepting a date or a drink with the wrong man, of being abused by the criminal justice system when reporting a stalker or a sexual assault, of having little access to affordable housing and health care for herself and her children, of just being allowed to make her own decisions for herself and for her body. Yeah, I’d rage, all day, everyday, and damn it so would you.

    So this Sunday, as fathers across America are honored for Father’s Day, let us men celebrate those who make us real “men” and “fathers” in the practical sense, as “fatherhood” does not end with ejaculation — it’s just begun. Unfortunately, too many men, and their churches, and their cultures, and their governments, forget that. Instead, women are stoned for adultery, forced into marriages as children, into having their clitoris forceably removed for cultural norms, murdered by their family after they have been raped, not educated or paid equally with men, abandoned by men AND society when impregnated.

    Enough!! The actions of this government permitting ignorance and discrimination that forces women into circumstances against their will, while seemingly benign compared with other examles I’ve noted above, are just as barbarous under our Constitution (where full equality is promised to all citizens), under the Bible (we are all made in the image and likeness of God), and as a matter of simple fairness and decency.

    It is far past time that women are treated as human beings and as first-class citizens, and that starts with autonomy over her own body!! Damn it!!!!!!!!

  • So if you’re a rapist psycho who wants to populate the world with your progeny, this law basically says GO FOR IT! It’s an incentive to rape, pure and simple. Way to go, GOP — the pro-rape party.

  • Analytical Liberal,

    All good points. I’d like to add (or emend) a few.

    While “Women and children have been exploited by the male gender”, it’s not quite “from time immemorial”. There’s pretty good evidence that, prior to big game hunting, male humans were either equal to or even subservient to female ones, more like our cousins the Bonobo than the Chimpanzees.

    Certainly, with the emergence of inter-tribal warfare, males (at last) played a significant, probably dominant, role in all societies. First of all, they were expendable, in several senses. Killed, they could be replaced as family heads, usually by a brother. Even less drastically, they could leave home for long periods without disrupting routines at the family hearth too much.

    Many would argue that their unique role in this regard is being wiped out by conditions of modern warfare. Much of it involves massive civilian casualties, not respectful of age or gender. Also, much of the technology of modern warfare is not very well suited to male physiology. Upper body strength and surges of adrenaline don’t aid us in handling computer-operated weaponry. There’s something almost tragically poetic about seeing an 18-y/o hunk picking at a keyboard or even playing with a Game Boy (where you can’t even use controlled strength to avoid the “tilt” of an old-fashioned pinball machine).

    Looking a bit further into the not-too-distant future, it’s easy to imagine (as science fact rather than fiction) human reproduction without the intervention of males at all. Given how much trouble we’ve been, it might not be such a bad development either.

    My doctoral dissertation involved studying the demographic aspects of settling America. The overwhelming picture is reflected in the typical old Western movie. A town made up almost entirely of young men. No children (except perhaps one, a pal of the cowboy hero). No women except “dance hall” girls. Hobbesian: life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. But, unlike Hobbes, civilization doesn’t arrive as “social contract”. It comes with women, whose presence is made possible through two key institutions: a sheriff and a preacher. Once those are solidly on board, “normal” women can come along, families can begin, and the standard demographic pattern emerges. I have an easy way to visualize “feminization of the frontier” in this animation.

    May as well say it: along with everything else, the GOP will never “get it” with regard to men and women, either. You’d think, now that it requires both to bring in enough money to barely get by and raise a family, that the Dems would leap on stuff like this, but, like so much else, they don’t seem to want stick to the obvious.

  • very cool animation Ed. Thanks for passing along the link.

    And, oh yeah, as for the topic–what Analytical Liberal and Ed Stephan said. (yeah, I know I get no credit for originality).

  • Encouraged by Edo, I’ll add a little more. I really do think the Dems need to look at that animation and think very hard about the implications of it. Through most of US history we have been, demographically, a frontier nation, with all the male traits associated with that life. I think it’s why cowboy movies were so popular during much of the 20th century, along with war and cop movies. “Chick flicks” were there, too, of course, but in nowhere near the numbers oaters were.

    Early on, around WWII, marketeers began to realize that women were the “gate keepers” in household consumption, that their ads should be aimed at women even when, during the ’50s, women tended to return to their pre-war status as non-head-of-household. With the continued feminizing of America marketeers have continued that trend and added an increasingly “metro-sexualized” image of males in their advertising. Only the politicians seem to have largely missed the boat so far.

    Of course there are still the Schwarzenegger and Stallone types out there and on film, looking sillier and more cartoonish with each passing year. And Bush still tries to “swagger” across the White House lawn (actually, it looks as though he’s messed his pants). But that image (and reality) is becoming increasingly rare, dinosaur-like.

    I have suggested several times that Democrats ought to think more often about the blue-collar and middle-income people who brought them to the dance in the last century. They should add another facet to their thinking. When they think of issues like National Defense, to take the most obvious example, do they have to think of it from the General’s point of view? John Wayne at Fort Courage and all that? Why not think of National Defense as a woman/mother does … think of doing only what we need to do to protect our children and their future. Think of what death of a 22-y/o child in Iraq means to the bereaved mother. I think if we did that way we’d come up with very different programs than the Bushies do, apparently in compensation for their own unimpressive manhoods.

    Or think of Family Values, the bugaboo since the last election. The only “family values” we hear of from the GOP are those trumpeted by crabby, old, survivalist, failing, patriarchal males: No abortions, no morning-after consideration for rape victims, no welfare queens, no fags … i.e., no threat to geezers whose days are over. Why not rather think of Family Values from the perspective of a woman/mother? What about prenatal care, better schools, universal health care, deadbeat-dad laws, ending hatred of those born gay? Those are real Family Values, and the Dems should capitalize on them.

    Take any campaign issue — guns, drugs, environment, suing corporations, tax reform, AIDS and breast cancer research, nation-building adventures, ramming someone else’s religion down your kids’ throats, you name it — nearly always thought of from the patriarchal perspective of our frontier past, then re-think those same issues from the point of view of women/mothers and see if you don’t see them in a new light, with new party & platform implications.

    As with blue-collar and middle-income folks, as with people of racial and ethnic and gender minorities, the GOP will never be able to “take the role of the other” in this way. As a result they will never come close to catching up with what we Democrats really ought to be thinking of as our political birthright, certainly our political future.

  • Thanks, Ed, for fleshing out my rant with solid analysis of the past and potential applications for our political future. Happy Father’s Day, everyone, and thank you, ladies of the world!!

  • Bill Owens, Colorado’s Republican guv, recently vetoed similar legislation that passed Colorado’s General Assembly that would have required that all medical facilities treating raped women notify them of contraceptive options to prevent a preganancy as a result of the rape. Owens said that he though it was unfair that a medical facility with religious ties might have to do something that could be construed as against its principles.

    “It is one of the central tenets of a free society that individuals and institutions should not be coerced by government to engage in activities that violate their moral or religious beliefs,” Owens wrote.

    I guess Owens isn’t worried about the potential of the raped woman being “coerced” into bearing a rapists “hate child”, and that the violation she receives at least isn’t as bad as that of the institution.

    The Republican obsession over the unborn has the sad stink of irony that while they care for the unborn, as soon as a child comes into the world he/she can be tortured, neglected, killed in war, incarcerated without charges, discriminated against and hated without the slightest hint of remorse.

    • Comments are closed.