The video has to be started to be embeded. I hope you meant that you wanted people to embed this video, because I already did.  It doesn’t embed exactly like a you tube video though.

This RH Reality Check video is exactly what came to mind when I read people talking about how she opposed it because of Plan-B being included in the rape kits.  How timely that was to have posted that so close before this story.  I guess Sarah Palin is against all forms of birth control!

Here’s a link to the Mayo Clinic’s info on the morning after pill:  http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/morning-after-pill/AN00592

There are many areas that now routinely charge for ‘rape kits’ and the name ‘rape kit’ is somewhat of a misnomer as there are defined ‘suggestions’ for a ‘kit’ but many municipalities actually make their own ‘kits’ and they may or may not contain ‘Plan-B’. Our local hospitals use a ‘kit’ suggested by the Michigan State Police that does not in itself contain ‘Plan-B’ but it is available for those that ask for it (and get one of the more reasonable ER docs who will dispense it). There are a few docs who WILL give it out under many circumstances but there are, sadly, a fairly large number who will not offer it, or supply it NO MATTER WHAT. They have turned sobbing women out of the ER to go to the other hospital to request it.

I would suggest that anyone seeking more information should contact the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP.org) as they have information on ‘rape kits’ and states and localities that do charge victims for them as well as information on ‘rape kits’ and statistics on the number of physicians that answered ‘no’ on a member poll from a few years back…

Okay that second sentence is irrelevant to this discussion, but

Holy shit. That’s way too generous. This is like if a female blogger asked in all seriousness if the scrotum is located near the elbow. The gross, grotesque ignorance of human female anatomy in both of his sentences is totally connected; imagining you can yoink a fresh egg out of a uterus with a pair of tweezers is just as shockingly ignorant as not knowing how Plan B (and thus conception) works.

As an aside, the reader asked if sometimes during these exams a fertilized egg is collected as evidence….

What’s discouraging about this question is the extent to which the propaganda—a fertilized egg is a person/pregnancy—has been working.

soph:

This is like if a female blogger asked in all seriousness if the scrotum is located near the elbow.

Well, it depends on how flexible you are.

Not all implanted egg/sperm cocktails are viable from the point of view of nature.  Health, age, environment, genetic factors, all kinds of things may affect implantation (tanning beds too, apparently).  I don’t know of a single woman who hasn’t had a “heavy period” and suspected it may have been a miscarriage.  A tendency to miscarriage runs in some families.  It’s incredible, really, how little we know about our own bodies.

egg/sperm cocktails

Mmm, I love ordering those at bars.

Another bit of flaming stupid here: it takes at least 24 hours for teh spermy wrigglers to make their way through all that girl plumbing to be anywhere near where an egg is or will be.

Since I would wager that most women seek medical attention before 24 hours, it is highly unlikely that there would even BE a fertilized egg - and if there was, it would be too late for EC to matter because that means ovulation had already occurred.

Otherwise, the surviving swimmers hang around until the egg shows up ... unless EC or other contraception has suppressed that.

Dan—or how incensed you are.

Might I also add that rape kit evidence EXONERATES accused rapists on a routine basis. 

I guess that just makes it harder to pin that despicable crime on that geek from high school you never liked when you know your daddy’s friend’s kid did it.

For that matter, it takes the sperm rather some time to get to where the egg might be, so even if the moon were made of green cheese the whole egg question would be irrelevant to collection of evidence of rape.

I understand that sometimes they collect the woman’s ovaries as evidence too.

I still think it’s useful to find out if these kits did contain emergency contraception, or STI preventive meds, because if they did, there’s kind of no doubt that’s the reason Palin opposed providing them. Palin is, remember, a full-on carry-the-rapist’s-baby ahooga now-you-get-herpes coo-coo-ka-choo anti-sex “feminist.”

Hmm, I’ll go with the Mayo Clinic or PZ Meyers on this one.  Plan B prevents implantation - that’s its job as a morning-after pill. (not to see it doesn’t do other things.)

I’m more than willing to accept that emergency contraception has nothing to do with this, too.  I’m inclined to believe it because it’s an answer.

Why then would the rape kits be an issue?  There has to be a reason, it’s mystifying to rational people, and I as a citizen deserve an answer.  It’s not a little thing, not at all.

Because interfering with God’s Plan for you to be raped and be miserable is far worse than letting the agent of that misery, the sexual predator, run free!

Of course, if Mr. Motorsnowthing wrecked his machine and broke every bone in his body and suffered frostbite before he was airlifted to Anchorage or even Seattle, that would be different.

Hmm, I’ll go with the Mayo Clinic or PZ Meyers on this one.

Um, didn’t he say that Plan B stops ovulation, not implantation?

As in here?

”Why then would the rape kits be an issue?  There has to be a reason, it’s mystifying to rational people, and I as a citizen deserve an answer.  It’s not a little thing, not at all.”

Simple, to keep rapists from going to jail.

See Ms Kate above
”I guess that just makes it harder to pin that despicable crime on that geek from high school you never liked when you know your daddy’s friend’s kid did it.”
Small towns grow good people after all
We cant have those “good people” going to prison now can we?

Plan B prevents implantation - that’s its job as a morning-after pill.

No, Plan B prevents ovulation.  It doesn’t have time to do anything to thin the lining of the uterus, which is the theoretical mechanism by which implantation is prevented.

You might want to follow the link gwangung posted because PZ Myers said the opposite of what you did.

Check this out:  anti-Palin rally largest in Alaska history:

http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/

Small towns grow good people after all.  We cant have those “good people” going to prison now can we?

As I understand the story the State of Alaska made a concerted effort not to have these kits paid for by the victim.  It may be a hack backward place, but not that back in the Dark Ages, obviously.

What small town people harbor felons?  Strangers who have violated their women so?  If there was such a motivation to hide a crime, well, where is the history of that for Palin?  You’re saying it’s a social norm to deny and hide rape, not if she has no personal reason to hide such a crime.

Perhaps her church?  Would they every precisely take a political and criminal position like that?  Doubtful in the extreme.

I still see nothing to answer my question.  Something is very wrong here.

Rape kit samples are taken from the vagina and from any external surface with obvious or possible seminal fluid or loose hairs possibly belonging to rapist (the hair root has DNA). The examiner does not get a sample from the endometrium (uterine lining) - the point is to obtain enough sperm for a DNA extraction and tests, and a vaginal specimen is enough. Besides, any sampling, beyond the endocervical brush used in Pap tests, will hurt and also be even more psychologically stressful to the victim. Yes, you can do endometrial biopsies in the office without major anesthesia. Many patients can’t tolerate the procedure enough to allow the doctor to get the tip of the biopsy device well up into the uterine cavity for a representative sample.

It’s sad that “she’s just lying” is still the standard issue defense.  Sad mostly that people still fall for that.

People fall for it, of course, because it is occasionally true that the woman lies, and when that does happen, it generates massive amounts of attention (c.f. Duke Lacrosse, Tawana Brawley).  Beyond that, I’m not sure what the defense is supposed to be.  When you have an eyewitness who identifies someone as the perpetrator, the only way to get an acquittal is to attack said witness’s credibility.  It’s unpleasant, of course, but I’m not sure how else one would defend a rape case.

Everyone’s entitled to a vigorous defense, and in cases where it essentially amounts to one person’s word against another, it’s not at all surprising that defense strategy would rely on casting doubt on the victim’s veracity.  Unfortunate, but I’m not sure how else it is to work.  Better ten guilty men go free, and so forth…

What small town people harbor felons?

I’m sorry, you’re claiming that there are no felons in small towns?  All felons are outsiders who come from the Big Bad City and are never produced in small towns?

Heh, I just finished Rainbow’s End by Ellis Peters. It’s one of her contemporary small-town in Wales stories, and everyone openly admits that anyone in the town would give any other local an alibi—even the town constable. It’s just the way it is. The murder victim was an outsider.

Well, from some people’s pov, rape victims are outsiders. They make other people uncomfortable, religions tend to suggest the victim may be unreliable, and women often benefit from embracing the patriarchy—being the good woman, and almost like one of the guys.

”Why then would the rape kits be an issue?  There has to be a reason, it’s mystifying to rational people, and I as a citizen deserve an answer.  It’s not a little thing, not at all.”

Simple, to keep rapists from going to jail.

I think it’s more nuanced then that. It’s a cost thing and probably an ‘icky thing’. They probably don’t want to deal with the female ‘naughty bits’ part of the issue of rape. Well, and possibly Sarah has rabid rape fantasies. You never know.

The ‘naughty bits’ angle is probably more to the truth. Oh, and you can’t discount the possibility that it’s about keeping ‘those cases’ off the local radar. If you can’t prove who done it, you can’t have your rich neighbor politically connected player thrown in jail.

It boggles my mind that the political mind can be so profoundly stupid but when laced with the juvenile impulses of the fundamentalist mind, it’s understandable but wholly not forgivable. Those laws effect all of the citizens of that state and could potentially effect the entire country. I grew up in a town that swept all the bad things off the front page. It was particularly bizarre when you knew what happened and nothing is ever said about it… Makes it seem nice…

Interestingly, I also found out that merely getting a rape kit done helps the state build a case against the perpetrator, because it shows that the victim acted in good faith.  It’s sad that “she’s just lying” is still the standard issue defense.  Sad mostly that people still fall for that.

Not only is that not the only reason, it’s not even the primary reason. In ANY type of case (by no means just sexual assaults), if the authorities have not been diligent about collecting and analyzing all possible relevant evidence, the defense can and should quite rightly make an issue of that, since evidence that might have exonerated the defendant could have been missed. I spend quite a bit of time analyzing evidence that I know is very unlikely to be of any value, just because the prosecutors need me to do so for this reason.

And by the way, false convictions for rape can and do occur even when the victim is acting completely in good faith. Often they are based on (notoriously unreliable) eyewitness identification by the victim, abetted by police lineup procedures that are known to greatly exacerbate the chance of a false ID. (In the past many were also based on incompetent and/or dishonest practice of the older and dubiously reliable forensic disciplines like serology and hair comparison, but thankfully DNA has largely put an end to that.) And progressives should never, ever lose sight of the fact that falsely convicted suspects are overwhelmingly likely to be poor minority men.

Hmmm ... how about talking about more important issues?

History Will Judge
__
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 19, 2008; A19

For the past 150 years, most American war presidents—most notably Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt—have entered (or reentered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George W. Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

Indeed, the three presidential campaigns between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Sept. 11, 2001, were the most devoid of foreign policy debate of any in the 20th century. The commander-in-chief question that dominates our campaigns today was almost nowhere in evidence during our ‘90s holiday from history.

When I asked President Bush during an interview Monday to reflect on this oddity, he cast himself back to early 2001, recalling what he expected his presidency would be about: education reform, tax cuts and military transformation from a Cold War structure to a more mobile force adapted to smaller-scale 21st-century conflict.

But a wartime president he became. And that is how history will both remember and judge him.

Getting a jump on history, many books have already judged him. The latest by Bob Woodward describes the commander in chief as unusually aloof and detached. A more favorably inclined biographer might have called it equanimity.

In the hour I spent with the president (devoted mostly to foreign policy), that equanimity was everywhere in evidence—not the resignation of a man in the twilight of his presidency but a sense of calm and confidence in eventual historical vindication.

It is precisely that quality that allowed him to order the surge in Iraq in the face of intense opposition from the political establishment (of both parties), the foreign policy establishment (led by the feckless Iraq Study Group), the military establishment (as chronicled by Woodward) and public opinion itself. The surge then effected the most dramatic change in the fortunes of an American war since the summer of 1864.

That kind of resolve requires internal fortitude. Some have argued that too much reliance on this internal compass is what got us into Iraq in the first place. But Bush was hardly alone in that decision. He had a majority of public opinion, the commentariat and Congress with him. In addition, history has not yet rendered its verdict on the Iraq war. We can say that it turned out to be longer and more costly than expected, surely. But the question remains as to whether the now-likely outcome—transforming a virulently aggressive enemy state in the heart of the Middle East into a strategic ally in the war on terror—was worth it. I suspect the ultimate answer will be far more favorable than it is today.

When I asked the president about his one unambiguous achievement, keeping us safe for seven years—about 6 1/2 years longer than anybody thought possible just after Sept. 11—he was quick to credit both the soldiers keeping the enemy at bay abroad and the posse of law enforcement and intelligence officials hardening our defenses at home.

But he alluded also to some of the measures he had undertaken, including “listening in on the enemy” and “asking hardened killers about their plans.” The CIA has already told us that interrogation of high-value terrorists such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed yielded more valuable intelligence than any other source. In talking about these measures, the president mentioned neither this testimony as to their efficacy nor the campaign of vilification against him that they occasioned. More equanimity still.

What the president did note with some pride, however, is that beyond preventing a second attack, he is bequeathing to his successor the kinds of powers and institutions the next president will need to prevent further attack and successfully prosecute the long war. And indeed, he does leave behind a Department of Homeland Security, reorganized intelligence services with newly developed capacities to share information and a revised FISA regime that grants broader and modernized wiretapping authority.

In this respect, Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era (the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA), expanded the powers of the presidency, established a new doctrine for active intervention abroad, and ultimately engaged in a war (Korea)—also absent an attack on the United States—that proved highly unpopular.

So unpopular that Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration.

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Hmmm ... how about talking about more important issues?

Sure, let’s talk about them.  How are you enjoying the new Communist government that Bush has established by buying up businesses with taxpayer money and having the government run them?

I hear General Motors is going to be the next company that’s nationalized by the Bush administration—we taxpayers will own the means of production!  Woot!

”What small town people harbor felons?”

Most of them, as often as required

”Strangers who have violated their women so?
They are not strangers, that’s my point

”If there was such a motivation to hide a crime, well, where is the history of that for Palin?

She discouraged collecting evidence.
She is currently having her staff duck supenas

I know I’m late to this thread, but I have to say I am flabbergasted that someone would think you could actually find and collect a fertilized egg as evidence. And if they did manage to collect it, wouldn’t that be abortion?