Yesterday, Fearless Leader, shamelessly pandering to his evangelical base, announced new regulations to protect the conscience rights of of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, students, insurance company employees and faith-based charities with religious or moral objections to abortion, sterilization, assisted suicide, caring for gay and transgender patients and their families or even possibly women with a history of abortion-- pretty much anything they disapprove of. It pulls together 25 separate laws, and covers not just a refusal to treat but even a refusal to to refer to someone who will. These laws referred to abortion or advance directives among other things but have now been considerably expanded, and will be handled by the Office of Civil.Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services.
Naturally, the Christian Right is turning cartwheels in celebration.
Everyone else? Not so much.
Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women's Law Center, is deeply concerned about the implications. She says it is overly broad and could conceivably cover anyone from the receptionist to a member of the Board of Directors of a hospital. It protects parents who object to mental health testing or vaccination, medical students and residents who refuse to learn techniques of abortion, and medical schools and hospitals which refuse to teach those techniques-- even though those same techniques are also used to save the lives of women suffering miscarriages. It is likely it will protect medical professionals who refuse to honor advance directives because their religious beliefs require them to use the most aggressive methods of keeping patients alive even over the express wishes of the patient as stated in a Living Will.
Think about that.
You are in a hospital, dying from cancer. You have gone to the trouble of drawing up an advance directive with an attorney and having it notarized and witnessed, expressing what medical treatment or procedures you wish and under what circumstances, and what you want to happen when you are close to death. You have made it very clear in writing and to the person you have chosen to make medical decisions for you in case you cannot-- you are terminal and death is going to happen. All that remains is how and when you die. You have indicated in writing that you have a DNR-- Do Not Resuscitate -- and you do not wish heroic measures, only palliative care so you can die without pain. In orher words, don't drag it out, let you go gentle into that good night, and prevent pain even if that morphine injection or drip may shorten your life.
And along comes some resident on call on that shift when your heart stops who decides your DNR is trumped by his religious beliefs and who insists on doing CPR ( in the elderly, it usually breaks fragile ribs) and even further procedures.(Doctors themselves tend to not wish CPR if they are in extremis, by the way.) Or who refuses to give sufficient pain relief because his conscience demands he prolong your life even though you may die in agony. In an ideal situation, some other doctor will honor your wishes, but there isn't a guarantee.
For this reason, I have told my husband never to take me to a religiously connected hospital.
Kossacks have written about the way women who are miscarrying have been refused treatment at Catholic hospitals because there is still a fetal heartbeat--even if the miscarriage in progress is causing the woman to hemorrhage, and if she dies, her fetus will also die. Instead of saving one life, they prefer to risk ending two, even though the standard of care is to care for the mother and rush her into surgery. Too bad, Mom-to-Be. The fetus you are miscarrying is more important than you, even though it can't be saved because Young Doctor Doctor says so.
I want to scream.
My best friend for many years had a mother who was an LPN at a very reputable and very secular Ivy League connected hospital. She worked the ob/gyn ward after Roe where she and a couple of others who were anti-choice sometimes had to care for women having late-term abortions for the saddest of reasons. When labor was advanced, and the woman rang for help, they deliberately dragged their feet answering. Sometimes they let her lie in a pool of blood with her dead fetus. it is hard for me to imagine anyone being that heartless and cruel,but I knew this woman and she could be sanctimonious. This law will allow them to refuse to care for the patient at all. In a hectic maternity ward, that will very definitely affect patient care.
One more example, one I wrote about years ago( you can find the original on my page if you search for it). A woman had recently moved to a new job in a new city. Her daughter developed an ear infection. Not having a family doctor yet, she asked a co-worker to recommend one, and made an appointment. When she got there, she was told her daughter would not receive treatment. This wasn't an abortion. She wasn't asking for birth control. She wanted her young child to be seen for a damned ear infection. How can any physician with a heart turn her away?
Simple. Doctor Asshole was a conservative nutjob Christian. Yup. I am bashing a Christian. For behaving in a very un-Christlike manner, and the church who taught him this behavior was acceptable. Go ahead and call me out-- but before you do,ask yourself how you would feel if it were YOUR 3 year-old crying in your arms.
He refused to help a child because her mother had a tattoo and a piercing. There is an obscure passage in the Bible (OT) forbidding that. His waiting room.had a sign stating he was a Christian and would only treat people who.met his minimum standard of appearance and dress-- and Goddess only knows what that standard of dress was. Floor-length skirts and long sleeves? Turtlenecks? Prairie dresses favored by the FLDS led by prisoner Warren Jeffs? A burqa? A chador? Would he turn away an Orthodox Jewish mother wearing a headcovering or a Muslim woman wearing a hijab?
This nonsense has to stop.We have seen far too many cases with self-righteous pharmacists who have refused to fill prescriptions , including for women who were miscarrying because they suspected it wss for an abortion. Or Catholic hospitals even refusing to summon an ambulance to get the woman to a hospital which WOULD provide potentially life-saving treatment, instead telling her to call someone or a cab.
How many women will have to bleed out? How many dying patients will be forced to linger in agony because they are denied palliative care?
One is one too many, in my book.
How about you?
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It is only a matter of time before someone anti-choice shows up to accuse me of hating religion or babies or calling pro-choice women names and women who have them for reasons that make sense to that women, selfish sluts. I do not intend to respond to you. Other people can, if they wish,but I won't. A mind that closed requires a nuclear bomb to open,and I am tired of restating the facts about birth control failure rates, women and their children being trapped in poverty, and the sad reasons women have late-term abortions.