Who Owns Your Body?
  by Groff Schroeder

Do we ever really own anything? Banks often hold the titles to our homes and cars until we pay off our loans. Consumables like farm animals, gasoline or electricity provide energy, but need care unless consumed or sold. The only thing you have that cannot be stolen, lost or given away is your body; it is the only thing that you truly control.

Other than summary execution, institutions can have no more power over citizens than dictating their bodily functions: what they can put into their bodies, who they can have sex with or how they administer their pregnancies. The Human Right to control your body, mind, sex partners and sex organs transcends the lesser civil rights of societal, legal and electoral freedoms, and governments that dictate their People's reproductive processes have rather infamous histories.

Rape is a horrific crime of violence accomplished by taking control of the victim's body (specifically their sex organs), often under the threat of death. Although rapists forcibly impregnate more than 25,000 women in the US every year, many religious hospital emergency departments routinely deny rape survivors information about, and access to, emergency contraception.

The Colorado Legislature recently addressed this egregious violation of medical ethics, informed consent and personal freedom by passing HB-1042 - Emergency Contraception for Rape Survivors, requiring Colorado hospitals to inform rape survivors of emergency contraception and offer contraceptives or refer the survivor to a capable pharmacy. HB-1042 does not require employees opposing other people's use of contraception to participate, or require providing contraception once pregnancy occurs.

Denying any patient information, medication or services seems medically unethical. Many religious hospitals appear to deny all patients informed consent regarding religious contraception policies by failing to disclose them in the contract patients' sign upon admission. Refusing to help rape survivors prevent impregnation appears to abet felony sexual assaults in progress by helping the rapist prolong his control over the survivor's sexual organs (especially when pregnancy occurs).

Governor Bill Owens vetoed HB-1042 on April 5, 2004.


In addition to this apparent abetment of crime in progress, rape survivors denied legal medications and information on religious grounds also appear to experience a secondary sexual assault when the rapist relinquishes control of the rape survivor's sex organs only to have the religious hospital assume control over them by denying contraceptive information, medication and services. When their "representative" vetoes a law designed to end this grossly unethical and arguably criminal behavior by religious hospitals, survivors appear to experience yet another uninvited control of their sex organs, and yet another form of sexual assault.

Under these conditions, rapists enjoy a much higher probability that their control over the survivors sex organs will endure for a longer time - perhaps forever. While some see rape pregnancies as "innocent" life, the genetic material initiating the pregnancy essentially is the rapist, forcibly coupled to that of his victim against her will.


When government dictates citizens' bodily, marital or reproductive functions, personal freedom cannot exist, "representatives" no longer answer to the People and the relationship between the government and the People no longer approximates representative democracy. Governor Owens decision to help religious hospitals and rapists expand their control over the sex organs of rape survivors makes the relationship between Colorado's government and her People less like a republic and more like the relationship between rancher and livestock.

Moo.

 

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