Whether you're asking about birth control, STDs or infertility, these discussions can be tinged with self-consciousness, even embarrassment. Now imagine those same conversations, but supercharged by the anxiety that your doctor might respond with moral condemnation — and actually refuse your requests.
That's exactly what's happening in medical offices and hospitals around the country: Catholic and conservative Christian health care providers are denying women a range of standard, legal medical care. Planned Parenthood M.D.s report patients coming to them because other gynecologists would not dole out birth control prescriptions or abortion referrals. Infertility clinics have turned away lesbians and unmarried women; anesthesiologists and obstetricians are refusing to do sterilizations; Catholic hospitals have delayed ending doomed pregnancies because abortions are only allowed to save the life of the mother. In a survey published this year in The New England Journal of Medicine, 63 percent of doctors said it is acceptable to tell patients they have moral objections to treatments, and 18 percent felt no obligation to refer patients elsewhere. And in a recent SELF.com poll, nearly 1 in 20 respondents said their doctors had refused to treat them for moral, ethical or religious reasons. "It's obscene," says Jamie D. Brooks, a former staff attorney for the National Health Law Program who continues to work on projects with the Los Angeles advocacy group. "Doctors swear an oath to serve their patients. But instead, they are allowing their religious beliefs to compromise patient care. And too often, the victims of this practice are women."
Obscene? I daresay it is. Who do these doctors think they are? It's their job to follow orders, dammit, just like at Nuremberg and My Lai. If it meanns excommunication (and if you're Catholic, prescribing an abortifacient does mean that), then that's just the price you pay for obedience to a higher good.
Last year, pharmacists were slapped down for refusing to fill doctors' prescriptions for abortifacients. After all, shouted the uterofascists, a doctor knows what's best for the patient. A doctor's word is final, or at least it was before they started getting all uppity. Now those doctors figure they ought to be able to be members of their religion and physicians. That will be corrected shortly, as it becomes possible to simply deny admission to medical schools to practicing Christians. But in the meantime, those pesky discrimination laws make it necessary to take a slower approach. First they came for the pharmacists...
Once again we see that "choice" means doing as you're damn well told. And if you belong to a religion that the abortion industry finds unacceptable, then you'll convert or suffer the consequences. Kind of like radical Islam, but with better-looking belts.
A/T to Catholic Überblogger Mark Shea.
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