Justice Department comes to the aid of rapists

It must be very frustrating to go to all the trouble of raping and beating a woman only to find out that the doctors at the hospital gave her a pill to keep her from getting pregnant. Luckily, rapists have a new friend in town--our country's Justice Department! Because even rapists should have a shot at fatherhood, I guess.

The U.S. Department of Justice has issued its first-ever medical guidelines for treating sexual-assault victims - without any mention of emergency contraception, the standard precaution against pregnancy after rape.

The omission of the so-called morning-after pill has frustrated and angered victims' advocates and medical professionals who have long worked to improve victims' care.

Gail Burns-Smith, one of several dozen experts who vetted the protocol during its three-year development by Justice's Office on Violence Against Women, said emergency contraception was included in an early draft, and she does not know of anyone who opposed it.

This sort of thing makes me want to put on my stomping boots and kick some ass.

The morning after-pill is not abortion. It prevents pregnancy, but it doesn't stop it.

I realize that it's a deeply offensive fact that pregnancy isn't something that men do to women, but that there are many steps involved and only one involves a man. I cannot tell you how many pious pro-lifers would tell me when I lived on the edges of the Bible Belt that some women "know" they are pregnant in the middle of sex, demonstrating a real loose grip on what exactly goes on inside a woman's body during conception. Now we have a pill that can prevent a pregnancy even though the man has done his part, demonstrating to some of us who didn't know it before that pregnancy isn't a presto-chango thing that men do to passive female bodies.

In order to preserve the illusion that pregnancy is something that men do and just happens to women, there is no measure too great, huh? Lying to people, telling them that the morning-after pill is abortion is necessary to preserve the illusion. Helping rape victims with information about a pill that can give them some much-needed control over their situation rather than subject them to further mental anguish is completely out of the question, I guess.

Via Echidne.