Controversy Over New 'Conscience' Rule (for health services)

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Exactly. Doctors exist to save life, not take it. This is why pro-life doctors refuse to perform abortions. In their view, it is no different from your example, so they will have nothing to do with it.

There were existing rules protecting their right to refuse to perform abortions, but there had been several attempts to bypass said rules, so they decided to broaden the rules to compensate.

I'm not sure it was the best possible response, but I doubt it will have any real practical effect.

rules can be made, rules can be unmade. The Obama ticket has already someone (several actually) to repeal a lot of the 'signing statements'.

I wonder how many conservative religious pharmacists there are out there. Unless you live in a small town, there's always competition to the local pharmacy. Take your business elsewhere...

MY GOD I NEED TO MOVE OUT OF HERE AND SOON.

doctors and insurence companies have NO MORALS! I'm sorry they just dont. They are money grabing fools.

Thats like putting a gun to everyones head.

The doctor thinks a child shouldent get an abortion, its not moral, or its aginst there religion.

A christion doctor wont treat me cause I'm pagen.

A gay person ends up diying from a hart attack because the hospital wont treat them because someone thinks gays are aginst god. grr this makes me mad.

And of course the cureption it leads too.
You doctor refuses to treat you because they dont like you . (officioly they list somthing else to get away with it)

stupid people!

And thats not even talking about the insurence companies^ .

And did i read federal governement too?!

Well lets just flush the sepration of church and state right down the tollet shall we!?!?!?!

I'm sorry to be this angry but this is people's lives we are talking about!

this is why religion should never be considered when it comes to anything major, some people have moral views which is understandable but doctor's and the government should never be based around any religion, instead they should remain neutral until religion is rightfully wiped out.

I think people have a right to believe in what they want as long as it dosent hurt anyone. But this is gona hurt people. its sad, really sad.

I dont know how the legal system works.
What can I do to make this change?
sign a petition or somthing?

i'm guessing a petition was signed to get this pathetic law introduced in the first place and as i'm in the UK i guess i have no official say anyway

No that's still illegal and in a worst case scenario (which it would never get to), the ACLU would back you in court.

The reason why they passed this is because a while ago there was a law passed that made it illegal for a doctor to refuse to perform an abortion on the basis of their own beliefs. So basically what they had said to the doctors is "we don't care how you feel, you can either perform abortions, or you can choose another profession". To those particular doctors, this was like saying "we don't care how you feel, you can make cripples out of perfectly healthy people, or you can choose another profession". They wouldn't have been happy with that ruling either. This was their way of trying to make it harder for the law to revert to that previous state where they weren't allowed to decide whether or not they would be willing to perform abortions.

This ruling doesn't allow them to make any judgments about who they will or won't treat on the basis of the person or their beliefs. It only allows them to make judgments about which services they're willing to provide. It's a concern for a small number of people who live in rural areas and would have difficulty getting access to a "second opinion" as well as to people who receive their medical insurance through their job. With the exception of rare cases in which a pregnant mother's life is threatened by her pregnancy or the birth and she's in one of those rural areas where she would have difficulty getting access to a 2nd opinion, this is NOT life threatening to anyone.

Your fear is unfounded.

I didnt think of the second opinion thing.
Thanks for bringing that up.

But that still leaves the insurance thing, wont this ruling make it worse in terms of them screwing people over?

It won't allow anyone to just do just anything they want. They have to have a valid moral objection. You can't validly object to giving life-saving medical care. You can't validly object to a person or their religion.

You can object to certain *procedures*. Abortion, for example, is taking life, not saving it.

Anyway, what's with all this hostility towards religion? If a Christian doctor refused to treat pagans, that would not only be against the law, it would be against Christianity.

here's another topic not yet brought up, what if a doctor believes it immoral to allow a suffering patient to live?

we've discussed so far that a doctor can allow someone to die because a procedure contradicts their moral view/religion so what if the argument turned to a doctor refusing to treat a patient because they don't want them to suffer?

this new law allows a doctor to refuse administrating aneasthesia, so does it allow a doctor to give a patient too much?

Oh, come on. They have to have a "bona-fide issue of conscience". Do you seriously believe that could possibly fly?


How could an issue of conscience or morals possibly allow them to do something like that? You do know that morality dictates that killing people or allowing them to die is bad, right? And that the Hippocratic oath - the oath that *doctors* take - prohibits that specifically?


How many anaestheaseologists do you know that have a moral problem with giving anaestheasea?

Giving a patient too much would be malpractice. The new rule lets them out of having to perform immoral procedures, it doesn't give them permission to perform the immoral procedure incorrectly.

That is false.
If a medical student has a moral objection to performing abortions, he or she can choose not to be an Ob/Gyn.
If an Ob/Gyn has a moral objection to performing abortions, he or she can choose to work at a Catholic hospital.
No doctor is 'forced' to perform abortions if they don't want to; they simply have to choose fields or hospitals that fit with their objections.

The rule change allows doctors that object not only to abortion, but to birth control or any other procedure, to refuse to perform that procedure in any clinical setting, from hospitals to fertility clinics to women's health centers. A clerk at a fertility clinic, for instance, could refuse to process the bill for a lesbian who was paying the clinic for artificial insemination because the clerk doesn't believe that lesbians should have children.



Yes, actually, it does. Another example is that a GP could refuse to prescribe birth control to an unmarried woman because he or she does not believe in sex before marriage.



No, actually, it is not. Not only can a worker refuse to perform their duties in select cases, but they can refuse to refer the patient to someone who will.

Last edited by LKL on 22 Dec 2008, 11:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gosh, that sort of sounds like ...a pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription.

Not quite. Anaesthesea can be objected to or not, if it were objected to by someone, they wouldn't have ever wanted to become an anaestheseologist in the first place. A pharmacist can't object to filling prescriptions per se.

If you're referring to any specific type of potentially objectionable prescription, you may have a point. But implying that you might possibly have a point is not making your point.