Owen's Personal Agenda
The Denver Post
April 10, 2005

Imagine being raped. The terror of a violent assault on your body, of fearing you'll be brutally murdered. The pain, the cruelty, the humiliation, the ongoing nightmares and fears for your safety. The possibility of becoming pregnant by someone you abhor, who violated every facet of your being.

Then, imagine some sanctimonious governor telling you that you couldn't have all the medical information you needed to recover from this horror. Telling you that medical professionals didn't need to inform you of a way to prevent a repugnant pregnancy. A way that was not an abortion, but was simply unacceptable to people with a certain set of religious beliefs. Those may not be your beliefs, but they are imposed on you anyway.

This is what Governor Bill Owens did by vetoing a bill that would have required all health care providers in Colorado to give women who've suffered rape information about emergency contraception. This didn't require anyone to provide an abortion, mind you, nor even to offer that emergency contraception. It's just said women should get information that may be vital to their future mental and physical health.

The self-righteous governor said, "This bill does not give patients all the information that they deserve, nor does it safeguard basic freedom of conscience." Victims should be informed "fully about the effect of this form of contraception." And, he added gratuitously, "House Bill 1042 will not trust a woman with this extremely significant information." Huh? Who is not trusting a woman with information about her health care options? Well, it's our governor who doesn't seem to believe that women can be entrusted with getting all the medical information they need to make their own personal, private decisions about what is medically best for them.

During hearings on the bill, two women who had been raped, become pregnant, and kept their babies testified against the bill. I would never suggest that a woman who wanted to give birth to her baby, however conceived, should be denied that right. Just as vehemently, I would never force a woman made pregnant through the violence of rape to give birth to a resulting baby. Yet the governor is offering raped women only two choices if a pregnancy results, abortion or birth, even though there is another choice, emergency contraception. He appears to have very little concern for a traumatized woman, just for a potential fetus.

Other rape victims argued poignantly for the bill, saying sexually assaulted women deserve to know all their medical options. Certainly, if I were to face treatment for any medical problem, I would have the right to know all my choices. Apparently not if I'm raped. Then, according to the governor, medical ethics goes out the window. I am subject to the religious views of those in power, not my own medical needs. Owens has put his personal political agenda over the well-being of women in Colorado.

In a recent New York Times column, former Republican Senator and UN Ambassador, John Danforth, a devout, deeply conservative, anti-choice Christian minister wrote, "The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement. . . .[I]n recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda [of what's best for America] to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. . . . Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction."

Given the specific religious agenda just played out in Colorado, maybe it's time to make sure that all women know what caregivers, what hospitals, will give them all the medical information they need, not just what someone's particular religious beliefs dictate. No woman who has been raped should be taken to a hospital that will deny her the information she needs to recover as fully as possible. A traumatized woman deserves more than this governor believes she should have.