Today’s issue of The Plainsman has an excellent article detailing what utter jackasses some at East Alabama Medical Center are about Emergency Contraception. One doctor absolutely refuses to give out EC pills, even to rape survivors. John Atkinson, the spokesperson for EAMC, showed his sensitivity thus:

Atkinson speculated one reason doctors may not prescribe the pill is because it is hard to tell if the victim has actually been raped rather than consented to sexual relations and later recanted. The doctors may have a problem prescribing the pill, which, depending on whose talking, either prevents conception or causes a potential abortion. However, by this point a rape kit has been performed to determine if violence has occurred.

It could be a concern for any doctor to know whether it’s a rape or whether the girl drank too much that night and had sex, and then called it rape, he said.

I’m sorry, I must have missed when it’s any of a doctor’s business to interrogate a survivor about whether she was actually raped. I also must have missed when this even became relevant to a woman’s right to have access to legal medical care options, including EC, in the first place.