Louisiana Emergency Healthcare Facilities Put Women At Risk

This release from ACLU shows how religious beliefs are put in front of safety and respect for women. Here we are not even talking about abortion after consensual sex, but about raped women who need access to every potential care.

ACLU of Louisiana Along With Broad Coalition of Advocates Implores U.S. Department of Justice to Add Pregnancy Prevention to National Protocol for Treating Rape Survivors

For immediate release January 6, 2005

NEW ORLEANS –In a recently released briefing paper, Preventing Pregnancy after Rape: Emergency Care Facilities Put Women at Risk[1], the American Civil Liberties Union found that only 6 percent of emergency care facilities in Louisiana provide emergency contraception (EC) on-site to rape survivors, significantly increasing the risk of unintended pregnancies. Louisiana ranks the lowest of the eleven states included in the report. New York, with 85 percent of facilities providing EC, ranks first.

"Louisiana's results are shameful," said Joe Cook, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. "Women who have been raped have already suffered greatly. When emergency facilities don't provide EC on-site they needlessly compound women's trauma. Failing to protect sexual assault patients from pregnancy is a health care crisis that could easily be avoided."