Women will no longer be controlled by women-hating anti-choice pigs:

Rape Victim Denied Morning-After Pill

By Tom Bowman and Diana Fishlock
Religion News Service



LEBANON, Pa., July 26 -- A hospital emergency room doctor in central
Pennsylvania refused to give a rape victim a morning-after pill because
it would be against his Mennonite religious beliefs.

Rebuffed by the doctor at Lebanon County's Good Samaritan Hospital on
Saturday (July 22), the woman called her gynecologist, who wrote the
prescription. Her local pharmacy told her it was out of the drug and
referred her to another store about 25 miles away.

Emergency contraception, often called the morning-after pill, gives a
high dosage of birth control medicine that can prevent pregnancy.
It's a pill that Dr. Martin Gish, the physician who treated the rape
victim, said he has prescribed previously.

"This is an issue I've struggled with for years," Gish said. "My
current feeling is life begins at conception."

"The dilemma I have is the whole rape issue -- Which side are you more
concerned with? Are you more concerned about the mother or the life
that was possibly created? That's my dilemma," Gish said. "I personally
don't have this thing worked out. I'm not sure how my faith can line up
with my practice at times of what I'm asked to do."

The state backs up his refusal.

Hospitals are not required to prescribe emergency contraception pills,
and Pennsylvania does not keep statistics on how many do, said Richard
McGarvey, spokesman for the state Health Department.

"There is a law that says if a hospital chooses not to provide a
treatment for religious reasons, they can do that," McGarvey said.

Dr. Mark Jacobson, Good Samaritan Hospital's vice president for medical
affairs, said in a statement Tuesday: "Our health system does not
presently have a comprehensive policy regarding this topic but we are
considering developing a policy with our medical staff to address this
matter."

Jacobson said, "We respect the rights of our physicians to practice
medicine as they feel is morally and medically appropriate."

Jenny Murphy-Shifflet, executive director of the Sexual Assault
Resource and Counseling Center of Lebanon County, said she has been
trying for a year to get Good Samaritan Hospital to require its doctors
to write prescriptions for emergency contraceptives.

"No victim should have to run around town after an assault looking for
emergency contraceptives," Murphy-Shifflet said.

Most hospitals in central Pennsylvania provide emergency contraception
to rape victims, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of
Pennsylvania.

"We don't treat it any different than any other legal prescription
medication," said Dr. John Repke, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology
at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey.

But Dr. Joe Kearns, former medical director at Good Samaritan, said the
hospital doesn't have a policy for or against prescribing morning-after
pills for the same reason it doesn't perform abortions.

"I'll tell you why we don't do abortions. Because there'd be such a
hullabaloo and disruption in this very Mennonite and very
fundamentalist community that there would be so much downside to this
in terms of people not wanting to come to this hospital, even though
it's their local hospital," Kearns said. "It's just not worth doing
it."

Danielle Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against
Rape, said that if an attending physician is uncomfortable dispensing
the medication, he or she could call in someone else. "Obviously, in
incidents like this, we want all victims to have access to
comprehensive health care after an emergency," Sunday said.

A bill known as the Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act
has been proposed in the Pennsylvania Legislature. It would ensure
comprehensive medical care, including the option of emergency
contraception, for all rape victims.

The woman who reported the rape was emotionally unable to speak to a
reporter, her father said.

The father said the woman was lying on the grass in her front yard in
Richland, Pa., at about 2 a.m. Friday morning when a man stopped to ask
directions. She told her father that the man punched her, knocking her
unconscious, then raped her while wearing a condom.

The victim waited until later that day to tell her mother about the
rape. The mother and daughter drove to Good Samaritan Hospital for
treatment but did not ask Gish for the morning-after drug until
Saturday, after talking with family members.