re: #100 iceweasel

(begin excerpt) Conscience clauses are a backdoor way for the anti-choice people to gain a foothold. It’s really pretty simple: if you’re going to be a doctor or a pharmacist, you’d damn well better make sure your conscience allows for that before you get your qualifications. You don’t get to pick and choose what treatments/services you will and won’t cover ex post facto. That violates the Hippocratic Oath, for one thing.

If you have a problem with the idea of performing abortions, don’t be an ob/gyn. If you have a problem dispensing birth control, don’t be a pharmacist.

And it really isn’t as simple as saying “hey, let the pharmacist do what he wants.” In some places there isn’t another pharmacy or pharmacist you can get to easily. And that is HIGHLY relevant when dealing with something as time-sensitive as emergency contraception. But it’s also relevant for a woman who works long hours during the week, doesn’t have a car, is 50 miles from the next nearest pharmacy, and needs her birth control prescription filled on her lunch break.

We wouldn’t countenance the idea of ‘conscience clauses’ for viagra or high blood pressure medication or anti-depressants for a doctor or pharmacist who was a Christian Scientist. Strangely, the only time the issue of ‘conscience clauses’ ever comes up is when it comes to controlling women’s sexuality and fertility. Why is that?
(end excerpt)

The way you’ve put this, any MD must be, as a condition of practicing, be willing to perform any legal procedure. Surely you didn’t intend it that broadly.

Leave out sex, please. Might a doctor refuse to perform a heart transplant if he knew the heart in question had been obtained as the result of an execution? It’s legal that way right now in China. Who’s to say it can never happen here?

What if the state wants a troublesome prisoner lobotomized? May a doctor refuse to perform the operation? What about executions, for that matter? I hold that execution is a morally legitimate penalty for certain kinds of murder, and that is our law. It is also the law that the execution must be performed by lethal injection, and this requires the participation of medical personnel. Nevertheless, I think medical workers ought to have the right to refuse to be part of it. Do you?

Now, getting back to sex, take castration. Gelding a man makes him more tractable. A good remedy for a troublesome criminally insane patient? Whether you approve or not, shouldn’t doctors have the right to refuse to perform that procedure even if some judge has signed off on it?

If you’re going to insist on a rule that any doctor who is medically capable of performing an abortion must do so on demand, at least refrain from putting the case for your rule in such general terms.

The sweeping rule you propose would force a large number of doctors to quit the profession when ordered to perform an unconscionable procedure.