c. 2006 Religion News Service

LEBANON, Pa. _ A hospital emergency room doctor in central Pennsylvania refused to give a rape victim a morning-after pill because it would be against his Mennonite religious beliefs.

Rebuffed by the doctor at Lebanon County’s Good Samaritan Hospital on Saturday (July 22), the woman called her gynecologist, who wrote the prescription. Her local pharmacy told her it was out of the drug and referred her to another store about 25 miles away.

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 previously.

“This is an issue I’ve struggled with for years,” Gish said. “My current feeling is life begins at conception.”

“The dilemma I have is the whole rape issue _ Which side are you more concerned with? Are you more concerned about the mother or the life that was possibly created? That’s my dilemma,” Gish said. “I personally don’t have this thing worked out. I’m not sure how my faith can line up with my practice at times of what I’m asked to do.”

The state backs up his refusal.

Hospitals are not required to prescribe emergency contraception pills, and Pennsylvania does not keep statistics on how many do, said Richard McGarvey, spokesman for the state Health Department.

“There is a law that says if a hospital chooses not to provide a treatment for religious reasons, they can do that,” McGarvey said.

Dr. Mark Jacobson, Good Samaritan Hospital’s vice president for medical affairs, said in a statement Tuesday: “Our health system does not presently have a comprehensive policy regarding this topic but we are considering developing a policy with our medical staff to address this matter.”

Jacobson said, “We respect the rights of our physicians to practice medicine as they feel is morally and medically appropriate.”

Jenny Murphy-Shifflet, executive director of the Sexual Assault Resource and Counseling Center of Lebanon County, said she has been trying for a year to get Good Samaritan Hospital to require its doctors to write prescriptions for emergency contraceptives.

“No victim should have to run around town after an assault looking for emergency contraceptives,” Murphy-Shifflet said.

Most hospitals in central Pennsylvania provide emergency contraception to rape victims, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

“We don’t treat it any different than any other legal prescription medication,” said Dr. John Repke, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey.

But Dr. Joe Kearns, former medical director at Good Samaritan, said the hospital doesn’t have a policy for or against prescribing morning-after pills for the same reason it doesn’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.”

Danielle Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, said that if an attending physician is uncomfortable dispensing the medication, he or she could call in someone else. “Obviously, in incidents like this, we want all victims to have access to comprehensive health care after an emergency,” Sunday said.

A bill known as the Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act has been proposed in the Pennsylvania Legislature. It would ensure comprehensive medical care, including the option of emergency contraception, for all rape victims.

The woman who reported the rape was emotionally unable to speak to a reporter, her father said.

The father said the woman was lying on the grass in her front yard in Richland, Pa., at about 2 a.m. Friday morning when a man stopped to ask directions. She told her father that the man punched her, knocking her unconscious, then raped her while wearing a condom.

The victim waited until later that day to tell her mother about the rape. The mother and daughter drove to Good Samaritan Hospital for treatment but did not ask Gish for the morning-after drug until Saturday, after talking with family members.

(Tom Bowman and Diana Fishlock write for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa.)

DSB/RB END BOWMAN