Did Palin consider "rape kits" a form of abortion?

John Aravosis (DC), AmericaBlog.com:

UPDATE: I'm now convinced this is what's going on. There's a nationwide issue going on where "Christian" hospitals or doctors are refusing to give these medications to women who were raped. John McCain's good buddy, Joe Lieberman, thinks that's okay. I will bet you that is what happened here. Sarah Palin didn't want to give rape victims the choice to stop being impregnated by their rapists.

UPDATE: Joe Sudbay just sent me this article. In fact, there are those in the pro-life community who consider treating rape victims "abortion.")

A reader writes and asks an interesting question. Sarah Palin's town of Wasilla, Alaska, was the only - or at the very least, one of the very few - towns in Alaska to charge rape victims for their own rape kits. Now, rape kits are the medical equipment that the police use to examine rape victims for forensic evidence. During that exam, women are sometimes given drugs to stop the implantation of a possibly fertilized egg in the uterus. (As an aside, the reader asked if sometimes during these exams a fertilized egg is collected as evidence - does anybody have the facts on this?)

Now, Sarah Palin's policy on rape is the following - rapist gets your pregnant, too bad, you're going to carry your rapist's child for 9 months whether you like it or not. Palin wants to outlaw all abortion, unless the mother is going to die. You get raped? You don't get an abortion. And extreme conservatives like Sarah Palin consider stopping a fertilized egg from implanting "abortion." (And if a fertilized egg is collected, they certainly consider that abortion, and murder.) Is this why Sarah Palin was quite possibly the only mayor in Alaska to charge for "rape kits"? She considered treating rape victims a form of abortion?

It's been almost a week now that the Obama campaign has ignored this issue. We wrote about it last Monday, a good 5 days ago. Obama said yesterday that the reason he's not hitting back harder against McCain is because he doesn't want to "lie." It's not lying when you tell the truth about a hideous issue that affects every woman and man in America. This issue had all the hallmarks of a perfect response to throw John McCain off his game:

1. Palin was the only mayor in Alaska to charge rape victims.

2. McCain voted against Biden's own legislation to ban the charging of rape victims.

3. Palin and McCain have made outreach to women, and faux outrage over "sexism," a central part of their campaign.

4. McCain got into trouble years ago for telling a rape joke.

5. McCain hates talking about these issues.

6. The media has shown a marked interest in this story - it's a compelling story they want to tell, but they won't truly jump on it, full force, until the Obama campaign does something with it.

7. The "reason" Palin's chief of police gave for charging for the rape kits was that they didn't want to raise taxes (imagine linking tax cuts and rape, imagine John McCain having to deal with the rape question every time he talks about tax cuts).

8. And now we find out that Palin may have been against rape kits because she may have thought they were a form of abortion.

And the thing, it's all true.

At some point, someone needs to have a chat with whoever in the higher reaches of the Obama campaign is responsible for missing so many no-brainers - it's beginning to look like it's Obama himself - while at the same time complaining that the media insists on covering the "lipstick" story, and accusing anyone who is worried about the direction of this campaign of being a "bedwetter." Had Obama jumped on this story on Monday, when he first knew about it, we'd have still spent this week talking about sexism - but it would have been the sexism of John McCain and Sarah Palin. And before anyone says that the story is telling itself - no it's not. There have been a smattering of news stories about it. That's it. There should have been a media feeding frenzy over this story, but there wasn't because the Obama campaign refused to touch this story.

NOTE FROM JOHN: A reader writes:

I should add that the contraception offered in these instances would either be Plan B or something called the Yuzpe method which is 4 tablets of a high dose oral contraceptive. It would not be RU486 which does expel an implanted ovum. Plan B and the second method have several modes of action, including prevention of implantation of a fertilized ovum in the uterus, but these modes of action do NOT include aborting an already established ovum.