Paging Dr. Owens, Dr. Bill Owens.
I figure Colorado’s governor must have a medical degree. After all, he claims to know better how to distribute emergency contraception than the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Colorado Medical Society, the Colorado Gynecology and Obstetric Society and the scientific advisory panel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Doctors in all of those groups think emergency contraception – or EC – should be available over-the-counter to women of child-bearing age.
Not Dr. Bill. Last week, he vetoed a more restrictive state law, one that would have let pharmacists prescribe emergency contraception to women.
Though the veto came as no surprise, it ranks among the governor’s most presumptuous. Dr. Bill explained that a law that would have made it easier for women to avoid unwanted pregnancies “strays radically from the accepted norms of medicine and is not in the best interests of Coloradans.”
Do tell, Dr. Bill. Enlighten us about the “accepted norms of medicine” that almost every major medical association in the U.S. seems to have missed.
For all but a handful of science-denying fanatics, emergency contraception is a way women can avoid abortions if they are sexually assaulted, if they have unprotected sex or if their regular forms of birth control fail.
If you want to talk norms, Dr. Bill, please rely on scientific facts, not fear and innuendo. Otherwise, we who are less enlightened about standards of care might mistake you for a quack.
You see, real doctors say no tests exist to show if a sperm has fertilized an egg in a woman’s womb but not yet attached to the uterine wall. So it is impossible to know when EC might keep that from happening. On the other hand, real doctors say 40 percent of all fertilized eggs never attach to the uterine wall without EC. By the way, if you want to talk about “accepted norms of medicine,” a fertilized egg embedded in the uterine wall is the medical definition of pregnancy.
You said you are “also concerned” that the EC law “did not adequately safeguard the right of pharmacists to refuse to dispense” emergency contraception “for any reason.”
Heal yourself of that notion, Dr. Bill. Given the insult you dealt pharmacists by implying that they are incapable of responsibly dispensing EC, your worries seem a bit contrived. But here is what the law you vetoed said: “A pharmacist shall be authorized but shall not be required to prescribe emergency contraception.”
Given the crystal clarity of that language, I’m betting Lawyer Jim – who is a worse attorney than you are a physician – could win every court case of every pharmacist fired for refusing to prescribe EC, no matter what the motivation.
Finally, Dr. Bill, you hint at sexual promiscuity by teenaged girls lured by the availability of emergency contraception. You say, “A 13-year-old girl could use emergency contraception as a form of regular birth control without a doctor’s consultation.” To which I reply: “And you, Dr. Bill, could fall down the steps of the Capitol and break your leg on the way home from work.”
Please, oh arbiter of “accepted norms of medicine,” refer us to the research. That’s what science demands – empirical evidence, not political rhetoric that sucks up to extremists and imposes their narrow views on everyone else.
If you’re not doing that, Dr. Bill, then supply the proof from places where EC already has been made easily available. Show that youngsters use it as a primary form of birth control and are more sexually active than they would be if EC was not available. The doctors and scientists most of us have heard from don’t want that to happen. But they say the data do not support the hypothesis.
Still, what do these so-called experts really know?
They would rather have women of any age use emergency contraception than have abortions.
How far out of the mainstream is that?
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
