The Nutmeg State Does Right by Women

48 thoughts on The Nutmeg State Does Right by Women

1. But EC is only needed if a woman has just ovulated within the past 24 hours or is about to within, say, the next 72 hours. How accurate are these ovulation tests in term of pinpointing ovulation? Hours, or days? In short, arg.

2. That’s interesting because Wisconsin is gonig through the same thing.

   Apparently the average age of rape is 15 here, so that was certainly something that made people realize it is necessary.

   It has passed the senate, so lets hope it ends up happening *crosses fingers*

3. fingers crossed indeed. It just pisses me off that we feel we need luck to make these laws happen.

4. So the Catholic hospitals want to only give EC to women who they know don’t need it? Nice.

5. Maybe I am just stupid, but: 1.) why would you bother with the ovulation test? Plan B is just high-dose birth control, right? So why wouldn’t you give it anyway just to be safe (because no test is 100% effective), unless there are health risks I’m not aware of, and; 2.) why would the Catholics get sticky about wanting such a test? Will they not administer EC if the woman has ovulated (defeating the point of EC), or will they not administer it if she has NOT ovulated or is not about to?

6. Elizabeth, I was listening to something on WPR (I’m pretty sure it was on Joy Cardin’s show) about the proposed EC bill, and one of the guests commented that if it got past the Senate (the show was on before the vote), that it would absolutely sail through the Assembly. Here’s hoping the guest was right on that one.

7. I’d just like to give a big shout out to Minnesota, my current home, ’cause the Republican governer just signed our EC in the ER bill and none of the Catholic hospitals objectd.

   Like Slug says, “Minnesota is dope.”

8. The commentors on the Courant site raise the interesting question of freedom of religion. While I believe that telling a rape victim that she’s come to the wrong hospital for EC and needs to go somewhere else (possibly far away, late at night, etc) is a shitty thing to do, I’m not real comfortable with legislating against religious beliefs.

   Then again, by providing an external entity to dispense the medication, it becomes the Catholic hospital pushing their beliefs on non-Catholics regardless of the (lack of) impact on the hospital, which is not real cool.

   And suddenly I wonder if the Catholic hospitals recieve governmental funding, which the government would be entirely in line to retract if the hospitals didn’t comply.

   Anybody got any good answers for me? Something I haven’t thought of? I’m fairly sure there is some way to square this all, and I just don’t know it yet.

9. Is it legislating against religious beliefs? In this case, you feel that a hospitals’ religious beliefs are more important than that of the woman that just got raped? Honestly, i feel that religion should get and stay out of medicine altogether.

10. Hmm, good point — it’s not legislating against *beliefs*, it’s legislating about actions, which does make me feel better about it (I’ve been pondering who has the fist and who has the nose here, which also helps). I don’t think that they’re more important, but I don’t think they should be disregarded, because that leads down a slippery slope to scary-land.

    While I don’t think religion should get out of medicine, I do think that medicine has a certain meaning, and if aspects of that are against a religion, then maybe the religion should realize that they are not in line with it and that they shouldn’t be picking and choosing what of medicine to practise, as the public health requires all of it. Ok, now this one is a reason that makes me comfortable with the legislation.

    (I think best in writing, so thanks for bearing with me as I work out how I feel about this.)

11. Then again, by providing an external entity to dispense the medication, it becomes the Catholic hospital pushing their beliefs on non-Catholics regardless of the (lack of) impact on the hospital, which is not real cool.

    That’s what bothers me about the actions of the Catholic hospitals. If they only treated Catholics like, say, hospitals for Jehovah’s Witnesses do, which exist to treat people of that religion so they won’t receive any forbidden treatment by mistake, that would be one thing.

    Instead, what they’re doing is forcing their religious beliefs on people who don’t share those beliefs, and doing it when they’re in a moment of vulnerability. Imagine for a minute that they had a policy that every person in the ICU had to receive Last Rites from a priest, no exceptions. Would that be an intrusion on non-Catholics, or would that be fine, because after all, it’s their hospital, their rules?

12. Mnemosyne: At the risk of sounding tin foil hattish, I think that what you wrote is the prime reason that Catholic hospitals exist: to force their religious beliefs on non-Catholics.

    While the average Catholic is a relatively normal person, most use birth control and tend to ignore the more insane rantings coming from the hiearchy, the Church as an organization is aggressive, crazy, and more than willing to do highly unethical or even downright criminal things in order to move its own agenda forward. It would not at all surprise me to learn that the official policy of the RCC was to use its hospitals as a vehicle to promote its dogma.

13. I’m not real comfortable with legislating against religious beliefs.

    Then maybe the Catholics shouldn’t be running hospitals if they have problems giving proper medical treatment to their patients.

14. I did my OB rotation in med school at a Catholic hospital (one of the dumber choices I’ve ever made) and so have come face-to-face with this idiocy and agree with all the points made about the need to give rape victims the option of EC. I’m deeply troubled by the Catholic Church’s political power and the way it’s used to limit women’s options. And I’m not Catholic, so I don’t have a sense of how this plays internally.

    But I also see a centuries-old tradition of charity in the best sense when I look at a Catholic hospital. Nuns were the first nurses, hundreds of years before Florence Nightingale, and Church-run facilities in Europe were often the only refuge for poor people. In the US, Catholic hospitals exist in part for the same reason the Jewish hospitals exists. Ethnic and religious groups took care of their own, especially given the rampant discrimination against both Catholics and Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the US. That meant that Catholic and Jewish (and black) patients were turned away from WASP hospitals, and it meant that Catholic, Jewish and black professionals were not hired.

    And while the Church power structure is a badly warped patriatchy and gets it totally wrong on birth control, their official positions about support for the indigent and opposition to the death penalty is at least consistent with a stance valuing all life. The Catholic Church opposed the “welfare reform” of the 1990s. I have more trouble with the fundie Protestants myself.

    But yes, Catholic hospitals and health-care systems get Federal and state funds and yes, they should be required to provide appropriate care to all emergency patients, and that includes EC for rape victims.

15. And suddenly I wonder if the Catholic hospitals recieve governmental funding

    Just about every hospital in the country gets government money: Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare is federal dollars only, but Medicaid is state and federal dollars, so all the requisite strings attach (although I think most states have various religious exceptions).

16. JayJay – As a matter of medical ethics and your own personal ethics, would you have refused to give a rape victim EC during your stay at a Catholic hospital? Or would you try to figure out some way to get it to her anyway?

    To me, the main issue here is not religious freedom, but rather medical malpractice. EC, to the general community, is a standard part of post-rape medical care. The fact that the hospital administration has certain religious beliefs incompatible with that generally accepted standard of care is NOT an excuse for providing substandard care. For example, if the Jehovah’s Witnesses ran hospital emergency rooms, they would not be able to refuse blood transfusions. They would be liable for malpractic if their bleeding-out patients died.

    Similarly, a rape victim denied timely EC by a Catholic hospital should sue for malpractice. She has an expectation of receiving the standard of care generally accepted in the community. The hospital does not have the right to deny her that.

17. I find it interesting that the Catholic hospitals are asking for an ovulation test. That could go too ways. If you do an (accurate) ovulation test, and find out that the woman hasn’t/isn’t going to ovulate around the time of the rape, it could possibly allow you to skip the EC, and the possible side-effects, when it isn’t needed. Same thing with a pregnancy test – if you are already pregnant, the EC won’t work, but you’d still be taking it for no real reason. And if you find out at that point that you are already pregnant, you don’t have to worry half a month later whether the pregnancy resulted from the rape or from previous consensual sex.

    However, I suspect their next step would be to offer EC if the woman hasn’t ovulated, because it wouldn’t interrupt any possible pregnancy, and deny it if she actually needs it.

18. The law, which will go into effect on October 1st of this year, mandates that healthcare providers offer accurate and objective information about EC.

    *beats her head against her desk*

    Why do we need a law to require healthcare providers to do their jobs? To echo nausicaa, isn’t giving inaccurate and subjective information about EC medical malpractice.

    This is why I dislike ideologs. They make me bang my head on my desk in frustration.

19. Neko-Onna: Did you know that the Catholic church is opposed to artificial birth control? They wouldn’t dispense EC just to be safe b/c EC is birth control and therefore forbidden.

    I don’t know WTF is up with the ovulation test except maybe an attempt to make women’s lives even more difficult than they already are.

20. I don’t know WTF is up with the ovulation test except maybe an attempt to make women’s lives even more difficult than they already are.

    Knowing someone who once worked in a Catholic hospital with this policy, at least there it was exactly the mind-twister theorized above.

    If the woman hadn’t recently ovulated, they were offered EC. It was fine to offer EC if they knew it wouldn’t do anything.

    If the woman had recently ovulated, they were not offered EC.

21. Shorter Catholic Hospitals: An ovum fertilized by a rapist’s sperm is more important than the woman he raped.

22. I don’t buy the Catholic hospitals’ complaints at all. HOSPITALS don’t have religion! PEOPLE have religion.

    Catholic hospitals hire non-Catholic doctors and non-Catholic nurses. They accept government funds, provided by taxpayers, many of whom are not Catholic. They certainly can’t refuse to treat non-Catholic patients. If it was a hospital that was 100% Vatican-funded, staffed only by Catholics and used only by Catholics, then they would have a point. But if they’re going to accept public funds and operate as a public hospital, they should have no right to turn around and try to force everyone who comes through the doors (taxpayers who PAID FOR the hospital) to abide by Catholic doctrine.

23. The commentors on the Courant site raise the interesting question of freedom of religion. While I believe that telling a rape victim that she’s come to the wrong hospital for EC and needs to go somewhere else (possibly far away, late at night, etc) is a shitty thing to do, I’m not real comfortable with legislating against religious beliefs.

    Because women are always conscious and able to walk or drive themselves to a hospital. They are never raped and brought to a hospital unconscious, or brought to a particular hospital by a particular ambulance driver or policeman because “it was the closest.” (or “his sister works there” or “It’s where I went to have that mole removed”) Women always always exercise total autonomy in the hospital they choose to go to after being raped, so if they end up at a hospital that doesn’t provide EC, they should have gotten themselves to a different hospital.

    (Can anyone tell I’m sick of listening to people rationalize the hospital’s failure to provide good care and making the issue yet another round of “blame the victim” ?)

24. At the risk of sounding tin foil hattish, I think that what you wrote is the prime reason that Catholic hospitals exist: to force their religious beliefs on non-Catholics.

    Yes and no. As other people have mentioned, there is a long tradition of providing healthcare within the Catholic Church. Several orders of monks and nuns have existed for hundreds of years with that mission.

    The problem is that the current Catholic hospitals want to have it both ways: they want to run as a public hospital, taking all patients and (not incidentally) plenty of insurance and government money, but at the same time they want to be allowed to impose their religious beliefs on their patients.

    I really think that Catholic hospitals should have their government funding cut off unless they agree to stop imposing their beliefs on their patients.

25. The ovulation test is to avoid the (theoretical) interruption of implantation that EC might cause if ovulation had already happened at the time of the rape and the egg was fertilized already. But EC can also work by supressing ovulation, which apparently the Catholic hospitals are OK with. A negative ovulation test would, in their minds, allow EC to have only a birth control effect, but not any sort of abortifaceant effect. But since Catholics are against artificial birth control in any event, I’m not sure why they concede to even pre-ovulation EC?

26. I suspect that requiring the test is a way of creating more procedures (and road blocks) that a woman has to overcome before getting the EC.

    So they start by offering an ovulation test without saying that it is required to get EC. The woman says “heck no, I don’t care if I ovulated or not.” Or, if they charge for each procedure separately, a woman who can’t afford the ovulation test can be refused EC. Or if the woman asks ‘what does this have to do, medically, with me getting proper treatment for this rape” they can truthfully say “nothing” (because it is medically meaningless) and then when she refuses the medically unnecessary test, they don’t have to offer the EC.

    In short, because it lets them refuse to give EC without saying that they are refusing to give EC. It’s all the woman’s fault, because she didn’t want medically unnecessary tests, and the state’s fault, for requiring it.

27. Forgot to add:

    Plus, procedures take time, and the longer they delay the EC, the less likely it is to work, and the more likely it is that any pregnancy can implant and continue.

28. Nausicaa and others, The reason for the willingness to dispense pre-ovulation is because the Catholic view is that preventing implantation = abortion, but preventing ovulation does not. So, they see it as refusing to provide an abortion, not refusing to provide contraception. Although it is odd since the Church is opposed to the pill unless prescribed to combat something like polycystic ovarian syndrome.

29. I suspect that at least some of the RCC hierarchy is knowingly and willingly participating in the continuation of torment of rape victims, and I suspect this is their aim. This might at first seem like a harsh thing to say, but considering this in addition to the movement of pedophiles from place to place to further prey on young children, the deliberate nature of these activities and the potential for underlying aggressive sociopathy should undergo a critical examination.

30. “Legislating against religious beliefs” my ass. If your religious beliefs prevent you from doing your job correctly, find another job.

31. We’ve been covering this story (attending all of the hearings and votes on this bill, etc.) all year at My Left Nutmeg, a progressive community blog here in CT, so here’s the scoop on the ovulation test.

    Catholic hospitals in CT currently have a protocol that requires an ovulation test before dispensing EC. It’s the urine L/H test, notoriously unreliable. Catholic Church spokespeople claim that if a woman has a positive L/H test, Plan B would no longer work as a contraceptive, but would instead cause a “chemical abortion” by preventing a fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus. If a rape victim has a positive L/H test, Catholic hospitals will not provide her with EC.

    The false claim of the Church (that EC will cause an “abortion” if taken when a woman tests positive on the L/H test) was directly contradicted by numerous scientific and medical experts at hearings in Hartford on the bill.

    Actual medical practitioners and scientists testified that:

    1) There is actually no scientific evidence that Plan B actually could interfere with implantation of a fertilized ovum

    2) A positive L/H test does not in any way indicate that a fertilization has occurred

    3) A positive L/H test does not mean that Plan B cannot still act as a contraceptive. Plan B can prevent fertilization even if ovulation has already occurred. It does this by thickening the cervical mucous, and thus rendering the sperm unable to swim toward the egg.

    Church leaders had initially indicated that they would accept a compromise which would allow them to contract with independent providers to administer treatment to rape victims so that Catholic hospital personnel would not be required to dispense EC. But they backed out of that compromise on the morning of the Senate vote. That last minute rejection of the compromise really pissed off a lot of people – even many Catholic legislators who worked incredibly hard to accomodate the concerns of Church leaders – and the bill sailed through both the Senate and later the House. Some legislators tried to appease the Church by introducing an amendment that would allow the church to continue to use its protocol of refusing to dispense Plan B to rape victims who have a positive L/H test, but that amendment was defeated resoundingly.

    Church leaders are still blanketing the papers and airwaves with accusations that this bill essentially forces them to perform abortions. And sadly, the media often repeats these accusations without clarifying that Plan B does NOT cause abortions. But the victory is ours this time.

    (BTW, I am a progressive, pro-choice, feminist Catholic and I do think that Catholic hospitals provide a tremendous service, typically to underserved communities, and usually at great charitable cost. But I absolutely support the state in its efforts to mandate a minimum standard of care for rape victims that requires all hospitals to make EC available.)

32. If the woman hadn’t recently ovulated, they were offered EC. It was fine to offer EC if they knew it wouldn’t do anything.

    If the woman had recently ovulated, they were not offered EC.

    I think you misunderstand how the EC works — it prevents ovulation, so it is the woman in the first scenario who does need EC, and you would expect it to ‘do something’. If you have recently ovulated, EC is unlikely to work, though there is some fear that it might prevent implantation, hence the Catholic objection. I still think it’s wrong to deny it to anyone, but it isn’t quite as illogical as you suggest here.

33. ““Legislating against religious beliefs” my ass. If your religious beliefs prevent you from doing your job correctly, find another job.”

    That was the end of my train of thought on the subject, along with “it would be perfectly fine if only Catholics used the hospital”.

    The ovulation test thing pisses me right off, and seems to defeat the whole purpose. Grrr.

34. Sarah 32, EC also prevents fertilization (even after ovulation) by thickening the cervical mucous.

    Obviously, EC is more efficacious before ovulation, simply because after ovulation there is a chance that fertilization and implantation have already occurred before the EC is administered.

    Either way, though, a positive L/H test doesn’t even necessarily indicate that ovulation has already occurred. You can test positive or for L/H hormones even before the egg is released. It’s simply not medically indicated for deciding whether EC should be dispensed.

35. Whoa, Anatolia, you are way off base. I was raised Catholic, and disagree intensely with the church’s position on birth control, and while there is a lot of blame to be placed for how pedophile priests were not disciplined, I have never met a priest or Catholic doctor who has it in for rape victims. If you think it is murder, you think it is murder, period. (Like my mother does. Beginning at conception, not implantation.) Most of the moderate priests I know, like my mother, would not want a even a victim of rape and/or incest to get an abortion. Most of them, like my mother, would not feel it was there place to say anything to such a woman or girl unless that woman or girl specifically asked them, and after the fact, I don’t think even the conservative priests I know would deny communion. ‘Course, I grew up on the left coast.

36. 33. Allie — It wouldn’t even be fine, Allie, if only Catholics used Catholic hospitals, since most Catholics think contraception use is fine, even if their leaders don’t. In fact, a Quinnipiac Poll last year showed that more than 70% of Connecticut Catholics supported requiring Catholic hospitals to make EC available to rape victims at ER’s.

37. Mnemosyne: While the Catholic hospitals may have began with a charitable goal, that doesn’t mean that the hiearchy hasn’t repurposed them.

    For that matter, historically Catholic charity has involved a large degree of coerced religious indocternation. As recently as the 19th century Catholic run orphanages tended to involve involuntary baptism, and as recently as the 18th century the Church forcably removed Jewish children from their parents if a Catholic child care worker attested that she had secretly baptised the child.

    More recently there is very strong evidence to indicate that Mother Theresa’s order uses secret and coerced baptisms in their various centers.

    My point is that the Church has a history, including a modern history, of using highly unethical methods to spread its dogma so it does not seem unlikely to me that the RCC clergy would use hospitals in such a manner.

    Anatolia That seems a bit far fetched, while there is no doubt that there are some psychopaths who would take pleasure in further harming rape victims, I do doubt that they could get much out of doing so at such a far remove. More likely its just fundamentalist “contraception in any form is a sin” thinking. Fundamentalists are always willing to sacrifice others for the sake of their own dogma. Moreover, I would imagine that many of the more powerful members of the clergy are pretty damn anti-woman and thus see increasing the suffering of a woman in order to promote their dogma as being a more than fair trade.

    I doubt that the non-pedophile priests really enjoyed covering up for their pedophile fellows, rather I suspect that they viewed it as a highly distasteful if necessary task to preserve the honor of the Church. Of course it hurt the children, but when looked at from the big picture their pain is of less importance than the grand task of saving souls, right?

    Besides, from my POV one of the most dangerous aspects of *any* belief in an afterlife is that the idea that a person will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife can lead to an attitude that therefore it isn’t as important to achieve justice in this life. Once everyone dies and is judged by God justice will be served, so it just isn’t that important if a pedophile goes free in this life, God will punish him in the end.

38. That just…doesn’t make sense to me. Why, if the majority of the actual population of the religion thinks contraception is fine, is the church policy against it? It seems to me that either a bunch of people aren’t actually Catholics, or else the leadership is wildly out of touch with the people. I guess that makes me wonder what defines a religion, where does it start?

    Not questions I expect to be answered, I’m just boggling here.

39. Yeah — there is absolutely nothing democratic (in the small-d sense) about the Catholic religion, that’s for sure. Well, except I suppose that the College of Cardinals gets to vote on the next Pope after the last one dies. But since Popes are the ones who get to appoint Cardinals, that whole process is pretty much fixed. John Paul II steered the Church in an extreme right-wing anti-abortion, anti-gay direction, and he appointed bishops and cardinals who completely rejected the more progressive “liberation theology” or basically any kinds of progressive reforms. So when JPII died, his band of appointed Cardinals chose just about the most conservative, doctrinaire guy among themselves to become the next Pope…and we see the effects of the new pope’s extremism in his support of excommunicating any Catholic politicians who support abortion rights.

    I have a lot of reasons to stop using the label Catholic for myself, but I mostly keep using it out of sheer Irish stubbornness. I was raised a Catholic in a tradition that focused on Christ’s teachings of mercy, love, service to the poor, and focus on the “least” among us – the powerless, the sick, the hungry, the lonely, the forgotten. I never remember the word abortion being spoken from the pulpit. But the Church as I knew it has has been almost entirely hijacked by men who have made the word “Catholic” essentially synonymous with “anti-gay and anti-woman”. And I just refuse to believe that’s all the Church is. It’s certainly not what Christ taught. So I refuse to cede the label to them. I refuse to let them tell me that I can’t be Catholic and believe in ministering to rape victims and allowing them to prevent becoming pregnant if they wish. Just as I refuse to cede the label “Christian” to people like Jerry Falwell.

40. Why, if the majority of the actual population of the religion thinks contraception is fine, is the church policy against it?

    The Vatican does not exactly have a history of giving two fucks about what the laiety think of their policies. The idea is the the church higher-ups are in touch with God, and what they say goes, no matter what the churchgoing public thinks about it. God told them that He doesn’t like contraception, and God’s word trumps public opinion every time.

    It seems to me that either a bunch of people aren’t actually Catholics, or else the leadership is wildly out of touch with the people.

    We have a winner. The leadership is a bunch of white dudes on the verge of death who have their own private state to keep them safely away from the great unwashed. ‘Out of touch’ would be putting it mildly.

    The Catholic laiety does not all think one way. I’ve know Catholic pro-choice anarchafeminists who liked sex and drugs and hardcore punk and could drink me under the table, and frequently did.

    I’m a lapsed Catholic, by the way.

41. Brad Jackson,

    Your comments basically supported mine. Many, if not most, people understand the torment associated with harassing women over being impregnated by a rapist and the cruelty of the imposition. Using dogma to further suffering and abuse is in and of itself aggressive sociopathy if you ask me and provides the “for the overall good” psychological posturing that sociopaths often use to justify objectively sadistic positions.

    To suggest that at least some of the RCC hierarchy derives a sense of pleasure and satisfaction out of this harassment and sadism is not outside the realm of possibility. Such abuse doesn’t have to be one-on-one for the sociopath to derive pleasure from it: being able to harass on a larger scale may be more rewarding for some, and convincing others to condone and carry out the abuse can become even more satisfying. Further to the matter, the attention some get from doing so on a larger scale could feed the egocentrism of the average aggressive sociopath.

    I think it understandable to want to recoil in disbelief and find some other explanation for this abusive behavior. We often find it difficult to believe that such people could hold positions of power and influence, but history and the present should suffice as adequate warning to not suffer excuses for such behavior.

    Also, I just can’t wrap my brain around the idea that sacrificing children to sexual abuse to maintain the honor of a god is plausible, particularly in light of the conflicting Catholic dogma that salvation comes through good works.

    Ismone, I’m not talking about your mother or mine. I didn’t mean to leave that impression when I spoke of some members of the hierarchy.

42. Okay, leaving mothers out of it, it is really a stretch to think that members of an organization who are following doctrine that is firmly established* are doing so because they are sociopaths or want others to suffer. If you think concepti (or embryos, or zygotes on up) are living human beings with a soul, it makes sense to say that killing them is murder. It doesn’t take a sociopath. It is deeply unfair to characterize even church leaders as “sociopaths” and assume that they “derive pleasure” from the suffering of others. I have yet to meet a single church leader who feels that way. You could say that their privilege allows them to discount the impact that unwanted pregnancies have on women, that they are wrong (and perhaps immoral) to value a clump of undifferentiated cells over a woman’s autonomy, that a conceptus (embryo, zygote, fetus) is not meaningfully human such that terminating a pregancy is murder, you can say all of these things without accusing church leaders of sociopathy. If you want to say a given leader is a sociopath, and have the evidence to back it up, go ahead. If you want to decry how badly the church handled pedophilia, fine, but you have not convinced me that there is a link between their behavior there and their behavior here.

    *Although not unassailable because there is competing doctrine, i.e. Augustine said that abortion was not murder because the fetus did not have a soul–other early church fathers did not consider it murder unless it happened after “quickening.”

43. It doesn’t make sense to say that killing an embryo is murder. Denying even a born person the ability or right to feed off of another’s person body/bodily resources for survival is not murder.

    It’s a bit odd to take offense at my suggesting some of these Catholics may be sociopathic, while defending their use of the label murderer.

    The link between the handling of the pedophiles and the harassment of rape victims is the same inability to empathize with the victims, which is at the core of sociopathic behavior.

44. Um, women who want EC should also get it. Any woman who requests EC should get it, not just women who’ve been assaulted.

45. If you think an embryo is a living human being, that has a right to continue living, yes, you can logically conclude that abortion is murder. Born people don’t have the right to feed off another’s body for survival, but unborn fetuses can only continue to live if they do so. If they are correct, people who kill fetuses are murderers. Fortunately, I think they are wrong.

    You are attributing motives to people, not describing behavior. Without evidence you are stating that the people who are making (or enforcing) these policy decisions are doing so because they are sociopaths, not because they don’t want to be complicit in what they consider murder. That is a leap.

    I do not think it was a failure to empathize (although I’m sure true empathy would have led to a different result). I think it was mostly two things–1) that they believed that these priests could be forgiven their “sins” and not “sin” again (clearly, this reflects a poor understanding of pedophilia) and 2) that they subsequently sought to cover their own asses. There was no pro-pedophile doctrine. Here, there is an anti-abortion doctrine, and although I think they should (and I sincerely hope, will) lose this battle, you have not convinced me that being opposed to abortion and wanting no part of it makes them sociopaths.

46. Yeah, and I agree with Lindsey.

    I wonder if there will be a legal challenge to Catholic Universities refusal to permit their doctors to prescribe birth control and refusals to stock it in the on-campus pharmacies. I hope so.

47. I think you misunderstand how the EC works — it prevents ovulation, so it is the woman in the first scenario who does need EC, and you would expect it to ‘do something’. If you have recently ovulated, EC is unlikely to work, though there is some fear that it might prevent implantation, hence the Catholic objection. I still think it’s wrong to deny it to anyone, but it isn’t quite as illogical as you suggest here.

    I don’t misunderstand how EC works, but the evidence for it working the way described has only been produced in recent years.

    The policy I’m talking about is fairly old (although “labeled” EC has only been around since the mid-1990s, some hospitals/providers have been offering EC through off-label use of birth control pills for decades) and from a time when it was widely believed that EC worked by preventing implantation, not ovulation. We’re talking a policy that existed in the 1980s and early 1990s.

48. Connecticut Bob had a post showing how small of a burden it would be for a woman who’d already spent hours in the ER to get from the Catholic hospitals to an independent hospital.

    The only cities I really know well are Hartford and New Haven, and I can say that the hospitals themselves are not in areas you necessarily want to be wandering alone in at night, let alone the stretch between them. Waterbury and Bridgeport are probably not any better. And none of them have cabs roaming around so that if you were brought in by ambulance and later found out they wouldn’t give you EC, you couldn’t just flag down a cab.

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