"Choice" is a One Way Street
As I have often said, the culture of death brooks no dissent. The Bush "conscience clause" regulations protecting health care workers from being discriminated against in their employment for refusing to participate in medical procedures with which they disagree on religious or moral grounds, has been attacked in court by six states. From the story:
In filing the lawsuit, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is seeking an injunction to stop the Provider Conscience Rule from taking effect. The lawsuit also asks the court to invalidate the regulation.This is just the opening of a drive that will seek to make all health care workers potentially complicit in abortion, assisted suicide, and other such activities in the medical context, that seeks to drive doctors, nurses, and others who believe in the literal interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath out of medicine altogether.
Blumenthal said the rule would allow health care providers or pharmacists to deny a patient medical care without explanation or offering the patient a referral or information on alternatives, upsetting the balance between health providers' religious freedom and patients' rights.
It would also override a 2007 Connecticut law that guarantees that all hospitals in the state provide emergency contraception, commonly known as Plan B, to rape victims. That law has been endorsed by Catholic leaders, who initially opposed it, and has not produced complaints, Blumenthal said.
And all too typically, the the story doesn't even bother to present the perspectives of advocates for the other side--surely somebody could have been found to defend the regulations. But it was able to get this surreal quote from the ACLU representative:
Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, drew a distinction between religious rights and the Provider Conscience Rule. "We have long protected religious liberty rights, but not when it curtails basic rights to reproductive freedom," he said.Fascinating. Religious freedom is explicitly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, but reproductive liberty is a "penumbra" that the courts have found to be implied therein. Which should have the first protection under the law and the support of a group claiming to stand up dispassionately for individual civil liberties?
Labels: Culture of Death. Conscience Clauses. Hippocratic Oath.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:19 AM
16 Comments
16 Comments:
This is frightening because what could happen is a total imbalance of ideologies in the health care system. Regardless of which side of the ideological divide one falls on, I think most people agree that a certain amount of dissent keeps either side from implementing its extreme.
Moreover, it seems like some of the obgyns and other doctors who would be less likely to pressure women into late term abortions based on disability or write death-on demand prescriptions often fall into this dissenting category, so that could also hurt women seeking information on their options.
P.S. The more I examine the ACLU's history, the more disgusted I am with it. I don't think that the organization does stand for liberty-it stands for liberty that it can package into its agenda, with a few inconsistent cases included to throw at dissenters as examples of how righteous the organization is. I haven't seen this organization take any significant cases for the disabled or elderly community since about the 1970s. It's horrible. When I contacted them about the elder rights crisis in MA, they told me to contact some disability rights organization instead. I guess the elderly just aren't a priority for them-unless, of course, they have been so railroaded in terms of their rights in nursing homes, etc, that they want to die. Then, the ACLU is happy to intervene.
WHAT KIND OF WORLD ARE WE LIVING IN??
Those who are negative and want to sink pull others down with them; those who are positive think in terms of uplifting others.
Blumenthal is a criminal who protects criminal abortionists rather than prosecute them which is what he really should be doing in a just society (which this is not). What a pity; what a tragedy.
The ACLU promotes violence against unborn children and other left-wing idiocy. It is not a legitimate civil liberties organization. It would probably do no good to tell the ACLU that the right to live a human lifespan is the most basic of all civil liberties.
It seems that society is full of all sorts of people who think they are doing good when really they are doing evil.
Some of them probably think they are doing good when in fact they aren't even thinking. Some of them, I think, don't even want to do good.
I remember reading the Sierra Club's statement that they promote abortion because they want to limit people to two children, to protect nature, apparently. I also recall reading about forced abortions in China. I *believe* (but admit I could very well be wrong) that it was a NOW representative that once said, "I don't believe in forced abortion, but China does have a population problem." And that was the extent of their comment. I'll check to be sure to check out who exactly it was.
From my own experience, I remember when Justice For All, a pro-life group, came to my campus. The same day they set up their exibit, a pro-woman group was giving out pink ribbons to support women's rights. Naturally, all of us who helped set up also wore those, becuase we believe in women's rights. We believe that abortion violates a woman's rights.
When some of the women from the other group came over to mock us, one of the guys pointed out that women in India and China are frequently forced to abort girls, because their nations prefer boys over girls, and that's why we support women.
Now, I don't say that she represents everyone, but one of the two women said, "I know it's bad, but we have to support their rights to abortion to protect our own rights." Which baffled me to no end.
If we're raising a generation of women who think that our "rights" to abortion are so important we can't protest the eugenic abortions of women in other countries, how are we expected to get those same women to respect conscience objections to abortion and euthanasia? "We have to protect our rights by sacrificing others in other countries?" With this thinking, religious objection to abortion seems like something archaic. Stupid. Unenlightened.
How is it unenlightened for a doctor to want to protect the lives of both his patient and her baby? How is it enlightened for a woman in China to be given a shot that forces her abortion just because she's already had one child?
Don't forget Clinton's wonderful Surgeon General Jocylyn Elders-she said publicly that abortion was good because it reduced the number of down syndrome children born and she still got the job! And, she was held up in one of my elementary school textbooks as an example of a female, African American leader for us all to emulate. I guess the fact that some of the children involved fell under the scope of Elders' prejudice was okay with the people who held her up as an example.
Prejudice is prejudice, and it doesn't matter where it comes from.
The "conscience clause" being challenged still sounds like an incredibly bad clause to me. I think there needs to be a balance between providing health care and honoring conscience - not a nuclear option for conscience. What if a pharmacist is morally/religiously against providing any kind of birth control (conservative Catholic), or psychiatric medications (Scientologist) or antibiotics (Christian Science) or a blood transfusion (Jehova's Witness)? Can they just refuse to do so, refuse to explain why, and refuse to suggest where one might get birth control? As far as I can tell, under this contested "conscience clause", they could, and that's crazy. I think, other issues aside, challenging this appears to be a good idea, and I hope it is struck down, and replaced with something that has some sense to it...
Doug: I understand your point. But the replacement will be no conscience rights at all--except perhaps futile care theory.
I say that there is a significant difference between abortion and birth control pills. Secondly, I don't want to government forcing me or anyone else to do something in my private life that I find objectionable.
I oppose both birth control pills and abortion because both are physically unhealthy, not to mention against nature. Conservative feminists oppose abortion because it is bad for women, and I agree with them on that. Personally I feel that those would choose abortion in circumstances that are not the most exigent benefit, and those who see nothing wrong with it, benefit the gene pool and society by not being reproduced, and meanwhile are themselves a detriment to society. The same Chinese who are trying to solve their population problem by forced abortion send us and the rest of the world pet food with melamine in it. I think Nixon, whom I otherwise liked except for the "fairness doctrine" etc., made a grave error in opening up trade with China; now there was something to be upset with him about, but what did people do? Ignored that and jumped up and down about Watergate. We don't even have the spine to cut off trade with them over their forced abortion policy, or over even one pet here having been harmed by their products. Which would mean that we had to, God forbid, work and produce products ourselves, and solve our own economic problems in the process. Instead we elected Obama who wants abortion available for his own daughters and presents as the new FDR (who was yet another travesty, not to mention Eleanor and the affinity of the planned parenthood crowd with and for her, and the UN, and the Sierra club, etc.) Plus he wants to adopt a dog, which of course has to suit certain specifications... When the solution was right in front of our nose. But the country that just elected someone who talks good and doesn't say anything concrete is the same one that accepted open trade with China and doesn't want to go to work to put China which does forced abortion out of business. Well that wouldn't be "nice" would it, having to work that hard, having to face reality and think, being rude to China, etc. God forbid we shouldn't be nice after all.
Ianthe-I agree about the more conservative, or pro-life feminist stance that abortion often harms women.
I am a bit more liberal in regard to birth control because while it may be unnatural, I would rather someone who is having sex outside of marriage use it than not, since that person may go and have an abortion as a result.On the other hand, I do feel that politics has restricted the amount of information available to the public on birth control and it's potential risks.
For instance, I get angry when I see advertisements for nuva ring that try to make women think that it's a "new, cool and liberal" thing to do as opposed to normal birth control, because I know someone close to me who suffered severe internal injuries after using an internal birth control device in the seventies. (the device's role in such injuries was proven in a class action lawsuit, and was made by the makers of Dymatap, a cough/cold syrup.) She and her husband had wanted to have several children, but she was heartbroken when the injuries she sustained prevented this. She almost died from complications after surgery to correct these injuries. Thus, it makes me angry when these risks are not presented in the open when discussions of internal birth control and abortion come up.
SAFEPRES: It's not birth control per se I'm objecting to when I say the birth control pill, it's the birth control pill (which had just been mentioned) and anything else that messes with the body the way these new "advances" that many women idiotically accept do. Where is their common sense? This is what comes from "trusting science" which is the same thing as having gone stupid, which is the same thing as having stopped thinking and not even realizing that it's necessary to think, and that's why we just ended up with the stooge travesty that just was inaugurated, issued an unprecedented number of executive orders right off the bat, and ignored hundreds of thousands of right-to-life demonstrators. He didn't have the guts and character to be gracious to them, which he could have been despite his position on the issue being different from theirs.
Well, obviously HE couldn't, but someone worthy of the office could have...
Just as a newly elected "oro-life" president could have been gracious to "choice" demonstrators, and without a president who is not rude to those who oppose his own platform, we are in deep trouble.
SAFEPRES: I know a woman who went through the same thing, those same years, same type of device, also almost died after necessary surgery etc. to save her life from the problems it caused, also ended up unable to bear children, and also is a wonderful person who would have been a wonderful mother. I still have trouble understanding, however, how anyone could have "trusted science" and used the device in the first place, except that this society so devalues women, who have bought into and accepted what they are told and not thought for themselves when they thought they were thinking for themselves, that science, medicine, merchandising, etc. are able to exploit them. It's going to take at least another generation, and probably more, for the process of women becoming truly liberated to reach fruition.
T.E.: They don't care about enlightened in China in the sense that we care about it here, or about the present the way we focus on it here; their sense of time is not centered on the present; to them the future matters more than the now and a generation is a very short time that is subservient to the goals they have for their nation far into the future just as to them, the individual, like the individual's rights, is subservient to the State. I didn't know they did it via shots, which sounds as if it would induce miscarriage; if that's the case, at least they don't do it the way abortions are done here. But it's horrible no matter what. Imagine what all those women must go through. They're just as callous and "utilitarian" re the melamine, re clubbing dogs to death in front of their owners if the owners don't kill them themselves if they decide that all the dogs in a province must be killed to prevent a rabies outbreak, etc. How a culture treats its animals indicates to what degree it respects its people and how much respect it has for life itself. And this from the country known for its reverence for ancestors and the elderly. Just as we used to respect life, freedom, etc. and look what we've wrought and brought upon ourselves lately.
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