March 03, 2005

Ugh, part eleventy-thousand

Per guest-blogged Amanda over at the panda which has left, a Texas state rep. has proposed a bill which would allow pharmacists to refuse to provide birth control, including emergency contraception. I've heard about this before, but I've never encountered an argument so disigenuous, ignorant, or downright abhorrent as the one she quotes.

Arguing that a raped woman has been extremely traumatized, he concluded: "A woman has gone through a trauma; for these reasons her body may not be fertile."

I've known probably eight young women who were raped as teenagers, and most of them still have a week of nightmares every year, around the date they were attacked. Several of these young women didn't take emergency contraception because they were too scared to go to a doctor; the unsurprising end result is often a bright young women branded a slut by the community, kicked out of her parents' house, and being forced to drop out of high school instead of go to college so she can care for her child with some minor financial support from the asshole who thought he was entitled to put his penis wherever the fuck he felt like.

This is where my personal desire to castrate rapists with a golf club comes to the surface again.

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