Rape Victims and the Conscience Clause.

Godless Feminist has a post about the motivations of the conscience clause, now legal in a majority of US states, that allows a provider to refuse emergency contraception to rape victims - often without informed consent or even referrals. Some states like Massachusetts have laws that require the administration of EC to rape victims - and Catholic facilities, the second largest of emergency room health care in the US, have staunchly worked to maintain such "conscience clause" denial of a rape victims rights.

One salient point made by GF is that, in the wake of all the "no abortion with my tax dollars" noise, is that Catholic hospitals - indeed most hospitals - serve a pluralistic society and are 50% funded by federal dollars through Medicare and Medicaid. Those who don't want to pay for health care that violates their faith best check their hypocrisy when making this argument.

Here's a clip from the post:

The rights of a hospital, pharmacy, and health care professional should never be allowed to supersede the rights of patients — especially women rape victims. It isn’t the well-being, health, or future life of that health care worker that is at stake. It is the woman rape victim’s.

And every pregnancy is a potential threat to a woman’s health, well-being, and life — including her economic well-being. Anyone from a nurse to a doctor to a pharmacist to a lawmaker or a judge who deprives a woman of the choice to prevent a pregnancy, to end a pregnancy — especially as the result of a rape — should be forced to contribute to the support of every unwillingly pregnant woman and to both mother and child after that fetus becomes a post-born child.

Rape victims who are ER patients should not be made victims again by hospital staff and religious organizations — especially religious hospitals that qualify for tax-exempt 501(3)(c) status for whom the public at large must pick up the shifted tax burden tab.

There is nothing decent, caring, or moral about forcing a physically and emotionally traumatized woman to risk pregnancy or track down an emergency contraception provider. There is nothing moral about stopping a rape victim (or any other woman) from preventing a pregnancy she does not want, or cannot endure.

Rapists do not have a Constitutional right to force a woman to breed for them and ER staff, hospitals, et al, have no Constitutional right to force rape victims to bear their rapist’s progeny.

Getting the Emergency Contraception Conversation Right.

USA Today's Faith & Reason columnist Cathy Lynn Grossman gets the controversy over Senate candidate Coakley's "devout Catholic" comment right. Brown and his daughters can rant all they want: the point isn't to bash devout Catholics but to bring attention to laws that should allow all patients' access to the services they need, despite the denomination of the hospital they are taken to.

The excuse that many give to maintain denominational care in Catholic hospitals is that those who do not ascribe to Catholic doctrine can go somewhere else. And yet our federal government funds these organizations in order to provide health care services to the pluralistic American society.

And with 20% of our hospitals operated by the Catholic Church, 50 of them as sole providers for an entire community, ending up at a Catholic hospital in a time of trauma or crisis is likely.

Grossman writes:

In a hospital emergency room, whose religious freedom matters trumps someone else's beliefs?

In the final ugly hours before the critical vote for the late health reform champion Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, accusations are flying. One of the newest comes from a conservative Catholic group that wants to see a Republican take the slot and, not coincidently, knock out the Democrats' filibuster-proof advantage in the Senate.

CatholicVoteAction is circulating a quote from Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. She was asked by radio host Ken Pittman about the religious liberty rights of Catholic hospital workers who would refuse to administer contraception or abortion-inducing drugs. Her reply:

You can have religious freedom, but you probably shouldn't work in the emergency room.

To which CatholicVoteAction's president Brian Burch, tagging on a fund-raising appeal, says,

Emergency rooms are NO place for religious discrimination.

Who would disagree with that?

Well, it depends on whether you view discrimination against some patients -- you know, the folks who are having the medical emergency -- is worth consideration. These may include rape victims seeking emergency contraception, or women with life-threatening pregnancy complications, gay couples and single women whose life choices don't match these conservative Catholics' views.

Many may not be Catholic at all and may have very different beliefs about their rights to make faith-based decisions -- or decisions based on whatever is their guiding philosophy. (Saturday was Religious Freedom Day and President Obama, in his proclamation, included people of all faiths and none as celebrants of this constitutional right.)

Mass. State Sen. Scott Brown, Coakley's GOP opponent, backs proposals to allow "medical people with religious principles to find another emergency room care provider to administer a pill or service..." according to Pittman.

Do you think, in a genuine emergency, patients are in a position -- if they are even conscious -- to sit up and tell the ambulance driver or triage nurse to take them to a place or hand them off to someone where they'll get the care they seek? Can ER employees be required to violate their conscience or can must patients play roulette with their health or pass someone else's religious test?

Far Religious Right Attacks Coakley for Supporting Emergency Contraception for Rape Victims.

The Massachussetts senate race, in the wake of Kennedy's death, is bringing the issue of emergency contraception and Catholic hospitals back into the news - and it's a good thing.

While Drudge and others are criticizing Martha Coakley, who's running against the creepy "pro-life" candidate Scott Brown, for supporting laws that require Catholic hospitals to administer emergency contraception to rape victims, the straight-forward issue of Catholic doctrinal treatment of a pluralistic society is again getting a necessary spotlight.

The Catholic church is the second largest provider of health care in the US, after Veteran's Affairs. If you stop by here often, you know that the 624 Catholic hospitals in the country, hundreds of long-term care and hospice facilities, and 60 health care networks all operate according to doctrine approved by the USCCB. These directives stipulate that religious ideology be used to refuse common and accepted medical procedures to the millions of patients who pass through Catholic health care institutions each year. Fifty Catholic hospitals in the US are sole providers, the only hospital serving a community, and the difficult economy is forcing Catholic and secular hospitals to merge at an ever-increasing pace which results in further limitation of services such as tubal ligations, fertilization procedures, counseling on STD and AIDS prevention, contraception, and compliance with patients' advance directives at end of life.

Patients go into Catholic institutions expecting to receive modern medical care and find that they are subject to Catholic doctrine. What allows this draconian application of religious ideology to a mixed society, despite tax exempt status and 50% of funding from the federal government, is a series of laws that protect not only individual provider refusal of service - so-called conscience clauses - but those of an institution. And Catholic hospitals are currently able to deny informed consent by not notifying patients of common medical services available, but to not even refer patients to other care facilities for such services.

The Catholic church and allied "pro-life" groups consider some forms of contraception to be abortion and therefore resist state and federal laws regarding distribution of emergency contraception to rape victims. Massachussetts is one of the US states that requires rape victims be informed of and offered EC when they enter a hospital.

Yet multiple studies have found that Catholic hospitals across the country have worked around such a requirement, offering EC only after it is proven (via yet more tests) that the woman is not pregnant. In other words, the Catholic church is not complying with the law. Coakley has brought this up as an important issue and opponents are using it to discredit her campaign.

Studies have shown that even Catholics strongly oppose the USCCBs teachings. A full 97% of Catholic women will use some form of birth control in their lifetimes.

By continuing to treat women with discrimination, Catholic hospitals are applying restrictions that are not supported by their church members nor society. Coakley is right to bring this issue to the light. Women traumatized by rape should not be shamed nor denied modern medical treatment simply because they've wandered into a Catholic hospital.

We have laws that prevent discrimination against women. They should be enforced.

UPDATE: Don't miss this new research paper at SSRN on conscience and emergency contraception.