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« Who's your celebrity look-alike? | Main | The antedating game » Wednesday, February 7, 2007Rape, pregnancy, and prisonA mouthy blog called Bitch Ph.D. alerts me to a news story about a rape victim who was "arrested on an outstanding warrant when she reported the rape, and then denied the second dose of Plan B because the prison nurse had 'religious' objections to birth control." Th blogger, whose name is not apparent, doesn't just gloss the article. She points out the other problem here, beyond the harsh punishment of this woman: "the woman is in prison. She has no recourse if she gets bad health care." More interestingly, she posits the real answer behind the difficulty in publicizing awful cases like these. So even in jail--perhaps especially in jail--women need reliable, safe reproductive health care. But we tend not to think about this problem much--probably because, just as in the comments to this post, people tend to feel that "bad" women are "bad heroes" for reproductive rights activists, so we're better off focusing our money, stories, and efforts on the needs of women who are above reproach. That's a bit like only debating the proper treatment of drug abuse primarily among law-abiding citizens. Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:32 PM
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