Wisconsin Senate Bill 129: Mandatory Emergency Conraception for Rape Victims

Position Paper for SB 129

This organization deplores the violence of rape and its multiple effects on the victims. Although rape by an unknown perpetrator is horrendous, many rapes are now occurring between known parties in the form of date rape or statutory rape. All of these rapes affect the victims emotionally and psychologically as well as physically. Therefore, to pass a bill that deals with only one possible physical outcome without consideration of the others, perhaps more damaging consequences, is an insult to victims and the medical profession. The narrow focus of this bill smacks of a political agenda that ignores whether the victim is tested for STDs, HIV or gets appropriate counseling. Instead, it chooses to specify just one medical procedure to further that agenda. The medical profession should decide medical protocol and religious hospitals should not be forced to comply with those protocols if contradictory to their dual mission.

Emergency Contraception is unneeded by a female who is at the stage of her cycle when she cannot get pregnant. However, this is a fact that this bill ignores, as do some birth control advocates. For Example, one of the comprehensive sex education curriculums recommended by the state Department of Public Instruction is Reducing the Risk. In the teacher’s manual, it specifically and repeatedly mentions that sexual intercourse results in pregnancy, which is not completely medically accurate. Dr. Douglas Kirby, in introductory comments, even states that only the mere basic information need be told to students. In a regulated cycle, pregnancy can occur only once during a span of maybe 1-5 days. So teaching a teen that every act of sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy is false, especially if used as encouragement to put her on birth control. In the recent national BUYBC (Back up your Birth Control) campaign directed at teen girls to increase Emergency Contraception use, the emphasis was on the need for both meds rather than teaching teens that if their birth control is regulating their menstrual cycles, they should know when and if they can be impregnated.

To now require hospitals/doctors to prescribe Emergency Contraception to rape victims at their request, even if contraindicated by the facts in evidence, adds to the misinformation and is bad medical protocol.

The bill specifically legislates against the bias of a doctor or a hospital. However, the required information about Emergency Contraception could be written by the drug manufacturer or even by the reproductive health groups supporting this bill. So how do you legislate against that bias? Will the information provided mention the religious doctrines that might be in opposition to the policy so as to alert patients of those considerations? Or is religion merely a bias?

Emergency contraception is available at every pharmacy at lower cost than in hospitals. Because of that access, rape victims don’t even have to go to the hospital UNLESS they are convinced that very important testing is needed for their own health and to prosecute the offender. This bill does nothing to encourage rape victims to get treatment at hospitals. Instead it focuses on the one reason why they wouldn’t have to go to a hospital.

Whenever a bill ignores all the known ramifications of a sexual act as this bill does, it contributes to the myth that pregnancy is the worst outcome of sex. When there is a rape, today’s victim is at very high risk of STDs and HIV. Her rape is rarely an isolated act on the perpetrator’s part. The assault on any female (or male) is equally egregious whether or not the perpetrator is known. For many of our teen girls, victimized by the coercion of older men, their resultant sexual activity puts them repeatedly at risk for disease and pregnancy. Rape is often not a single violation but is “repeated” through the onset of victim promiscuity as an injured spirit reacts. Birth control nor Emergency contraception does anything for that causal pain.