The Beltway people, that is, all the talking heads and conventional wisdom purveyors, have been saying that swell guy Joe Lieberman is being unfairly attacked by angry bloggers and rabid anti-war protesters. They can’t wrap their brains around the possibility that their Joe might be defeated in the primary by somebody they never heard of or that the rabble (actual voters) has lots of reasons to be tired of good ole Joe: He’ll probably be the last senator to say he regrets voting for the war. The Kiss of Doom from Bush. His pallid Zell Miller imitation in publicly attacking some other Democrat and supporting the 34% approval administration at least three times a day, on Fox News if possible. His assertion that a raped woman denied morning-after contraception in a hospital emergency room can simply drive to another ER, because there are lots of them in Connecticut.
This morning I came across Dr. Martin Gish, who ought to move to the Nutmeg State so he can vote for Joe.
Emergency contraception, often called the morning-after pill, gives a high dosage of birth-control medicine that can prevent pregnancy.It’s a pill that Dr. Martin Gish, the physician who treated the rape victim, said he has prescribed.
“This is an issue I’ve struggled with for years,” Gish said. “My current feeling is life begins at conception, and I feel that anything that interferes with that” causes an abortion.
In this travesty, the woman had to go from Lebanon (Pennsylvania) to Reading to relieve herself of the dread of next year giving birth to her rapist’s baby. It’s a good thing she had her family’s support because that’s farther than rapees generally have to crawl in Joe's bailiwick.
The hospital administrator quoted didn’t think that was any big deal; people from Lebanon go to Reading to buy jeans all the time, he said.
But then the real reason raised its ugly head:
But Kearns said Good Samaritan will not formulate a policy for or against prescribing morning-after pills for the same reason it won’t perform abortions.“I’ll tell you why we don’t do abortions. Because there’d be such a hullabaloo and disruption in this very-Mennonite and very-fundamentalist community that there would be so much downside to this in terms of people not wanting to come to this hospital, even though it’s their local hospital,” Kearns said. “It’s just not worth doing it.”
Filthy lucre. The hospital figures it makes more money catering to the Intelligent Design crowd than it would by properly caring for its patients.
The real Good Samaritan wasn’t out to make a buck.
