Catch-up

I'm still back-logged on interesting and maddening articles sent from friends, but fortunately BitchPhD has beaten me to the one Sid left in comments yesterday. Here's an excerpt from her page (but really, click over and read the whole thing. You know you want to):

The linked article spends a lot of time focusing on the problem with arresting rape victims, so I'm not going to get into that. But. The throwaway paragraph about the Plan B demonstrates something that there was a lot of talk about at NAPW last week, and it deserves more attention.

Here's the paragraph:

Adding to the mother's ire is her claim that a jail nurse prevented her daughter from taking a second dose of emergency contraception prescribed by a nurse at a clinic as part of a rape examination. The jail nurse, said the mother and the victim's attorney, denied the medication for religious reasons.

Okay. Again, leaving aside the question of whether the woman should have been in prison, and even leaving aside the issue of health care practitioners who should be fired for not doing their jobs, let's talk about the other problem here: the woman is in prison. She has no recourse if she gets bad health care. Maybe she can file some kind of lawsuit, but that isn't going to help her in the here and now, when she needs medication.