A bill to require hospitals to tell rape victims about the existence of emergency contraception passed out of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee on Wednesday. Again.
Similar legislation has been debated for years in the Colorado legislature and even passed in 2005, only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Bill Owens, who said the bill violated the rights of Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide patients information about contraception.
In 2007, Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, expects to see the bill become law, and it’s about time.
“I’m happy about it,” she said. “I expect it will be signed this year.”
But even now, with Owens safely retired to the private sector, the screwball logic of opponents to EC lives on in the language of the legislation.
One telltale line in the bill summary is a dead giveaway that Boyd has made nice with the new guv, a guy who believes in a woman’s right to reproductive freedom except when he doesn’t.
The line says: “Hospitals shall not be required to provide emergency contraception to a pregnant woman.”
As with the rest of the shameful 30-year history of denying American women access to emergency contraception, this nonsensical statement has everything to do with power politics and nothing to do with medicine.
It’s hogwash on so many levels.
For starters, there’s the matter of the uselessness of emergency contraception after a woman is pregnant.
Manufacturers of the drug, scientists who have tested the drug, FDA advisers, the millions of women around the world who have used the drug for decades and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agree that the high dose of progestin used in EC does not terminate a pregnancy. This is not RU 486, so there is no reason for anyone to give EC to a pregnant woman.
EC is effective only if used within 72 hours of unprotected sex, not after pregnancy has occurred.
The way the drug prevents pregnancy is by interfering with ovulation or implantation of a fertilized egg. Once a woman is pregnant, it’s too late for EC. Exempting hospitals from a requirement to provide EC to pregnant women is like exempting them from a requirement to provide Viagra for dandruff. It’s ridiculous.
Scientific and medical logic aside, the exemption is a befuddling non sequitur in the context of Senate Bill 60, even for Catholics with serious hangups about contraception.
SB 60 wouldn’t require anybody to provide emergency contraception under any circumstance. Here’s what it says:
“All health care facilities … shall amend their evidence-collection protocols for the treatment of sexual assault survivors to include informing the survivor in a timely manner of the availability of emergency contraception as a means of pregnancy prophylaxis and educating the survivor on the proper use of EC and the appropriate follow- up care.”
All they must do is talk about it.
Then if the rape victim wants EC, she can leave the hospital and buy it. If she’s 18 or older, she can get it from a pharmacy without a prescription.
When I read SB 60 and saw the meaningless exemption from providing EC to pregnant women, I knew I’d heard something like that before and I had a pretty good idea where. I searched the voice files from old interviews and found it, right there at minute 23 of a long interview with then-candidate Bill Ritter in December 2005.
“I would sign a bill that required people to give emergency contraception information to rape victims unless the rape victim is pregnant,” he said. “I would require that one exception.”
Kate Horle, spokeswoman from Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, was willing to bend to the guv’s whim this time for one simple reason: “The bill doesn’t require hospitals to provide EC at all. It only requires them to provide information.”
So who cares about the exemption?
Indeed. Let him pretend it matters. Just so he signs the bill.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
