I arrived in Silverthorne last week intent on spending a relaxing week-long vacation skiing with my parents.I had left behind my more than full-time work in the field of international reproductive health at a Swedish university and the World Health Organization.But then I made a mistake. I picked up the Denver Post on March 30 and saw the headline story: “Pill bill to test Owens.”Some Catholic groups and individuals in Colorado, according to the Denver Post, say that emergency contraception (also known as the “morning after pill”) does “more than prevent a woman from getting pregnant.”They are wrong. Emergency contraception is nothing more than post-coital (after sex) contraception, which is why it is categorized as contraception, like condoms or “the pill.”It would make good sense for these doubters to visit a website maintained by Princeton University and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals and get the facts: http://ec.princeton.edu/.But what does all this have to do with the woman on the street?Well, should she be one of the roughly 1,800 reported rape victims in Colorado each year, it means that she would be denied emergency contraception should she turn up at a Catholic-run hospital (almost one in five emergency room visits in Colorado are to a Catholic hospital) and not even referred to an institution that does provide it. This latter point is the subject of a bill sponsored by Rep. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, supported by the Republican Majority for Choice and Catholics for a Free Choice among others, and being considered by Gov. Owens now. Quite simply, the bill is about medicine and not religion. And it is a quite generous bill, covering only institutions and not individuals. This means that employees who feel uncomfortable for religious reasons about informing patients (for example rape victims) about emergency contraception would not be required to do so; someone else at their institution could do it.And by doing so, they may even help rape victims avoid abortion.