carapace – Not your father's america

By Jim Spencer
Denver Post Columnist

Article Published: Friday, April 29, 2005

Imagine two rape victims taken to the same hospital emergency room. Imagine them put in adjoining examination rooms.

Let’s say they have identical injuries.

Presume everything about them is the same except for where they are in their menstrual cycles.

Do they deserve access to the same medical treatment?

At most Catholic hospitals in Colorado, they can’t get it.

The protocol of six Catholic hospitals run by Centura calls for rape victims to undergo an ovulation test.

If they have not ovulated, said Centura corporate spokeswoman Dana Berry, doctors tell the victims about emergency contraception and write prescriptions for it if the patient asks.

If, however, the urine test suggests that a rape victim has ovulated, Berry continued, doctors at Centura’s Catholic hospitals are not to mention emergency contraception. That means the victim can end up pregnant by her rapist.

If it strikes you as weird that two rape victims could receive such different medical treatment in the same ER, get on the phone to your state representative and senator.

Time is running out for legislators to try to override the governor’s ridiculous veto of an emergency-contraception notification bill for rape victims.

And here’s hoping Republican legislators and Republican Gov. Bill Owens finally get the message.

This isn’t about abortion; it’s about crime victims. The so-called EC bill is a symbol of mainstream American values. It comforts the afflicted. It restores control after a terrible trauma. It allows individuals to have information.

If your elected representatives balk at that because the chances of overriding the veto are slim, tell ‘em what Carol Stamm, the doctor who heads the Colorado Gynecologic and Obstetrics Society, said so eloquently:

When religion and science get mixed up, no one benefits.

That includes Colorado’s Catholic hierarchy, which orders doctors at its hospitals not to do their jobs as defined by the American Medical Association.

It includes Owens, who argues that religious freedom allows private religious hospitals to collect public dollars, then lets them treat rape victims differently based on a definition of conception that differs from that of the National Institutes of Health.

But most of all, it includes those befouled by a vicious crime. Without an emergency-contraception notification law, they can easily end up victimized a second time for nothing more than the vagaries of their cycle.

Science needs to control public health. And, said Stamm, all kinds of science suggests that emergency contraception taken within 72 hours of an assault is an effective way for the victim to keep from getting pregnant.

Science also suggests that emergency contraception that employs the hormone progesterone rather than a mixture of the hormones estrogen and progesterone will not keep a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterine wall, Stamm said.

That ought to answer Catholic concerns that life begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg.

But Tim Dore, executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, says directives from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops require Catholic hospitals “to err on the side of life.”

Stamm knows of no test that can determine whether a rapist has fertilized his victim’s egg in the period when emergency contraception works.

Neither do Catholic hospitals.

So they rely on a nonspecific ovulation test that condemns every rape victim who might possibly have an egg in her reproductive system to a different standard of medical care.

This, says the Catholic Church, is religious freedom.

This, the governor agrees, is a constitutional right.

This, the rest of us must force them to understand, is madness.

Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com .