http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-08-21-hhs-abortions_N.htm
What’s missing here?
Oh, right – the patient – who has no choice about what sort of doctor to see for certain types of medical procedures, while doctors have lots of choices about what their medical specialties will be. Podiatrists don’t perform abortions or sterilizations, nor do they prescribe birth control or morning after pills. Ditto for proctologists, plastic surgeons, neurosurgeons, otorhinolaryngologists, nuclear medical doctors, orthopedists, oncologists, or thoracic surgeons.
“Freedom of conscience is not to be surrendered upon issuance of a medical degree,” said Leavitt. “This nation was built on a foundation of free speech. The first principle of free speech is protected conscience.”
Except the patient doesn’t get to have a choice. For many women, we already have to travel long distances to get to a single doctor who can or will perform necessary female medical procedures. In some cases, women have to travel out of state to get to the nearest doctor to help them – and, oh yeah – some states have made it a criminal offense for women to cross state lines for medical care.
By passing this proposal, this administration is imposing even harsher burdens upon women who seek doctors for their healthcare needs.
“Nothing in the new regulation in any way changes a patient’s right to any legal procedure,” he (Leavitt) said, noting that a patient could go to another provider.
Yes, sure, but only if the patient can find a doctor in her state that provides the healthcare she needs. We’re not talking just abortion here. They’ve stretched it to cover sterilization, too, but I bet they only mean only female sterilization. I haven’t seen word one about vasectomies and doctors protesting performing vasectomies. And female sterilization can be stretched to include birth control, no matter what this Leavitt says, as sterilization is a form of birth control.
“Leavitt said the regulation was intended to protect practitioners who have moral objections to abortion and sterilization, and would not interfere with patients’ ability to get birth control or any legal medical procedure.”
Abortion is a legal medical procedure. We worked really hard to make it legal back in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Sterilization shouldn’t even be on the agenda here – sterilizing a person isn’t the same procedure as abortion, even if it is performed by the same type of doctor.
Listen closely all you doctors and future doctors – if you object to performing certain medical procedures – procedures that are performed almost exclusively by one type of doctor and only one type of doctor – pick a different type of doctor to be. When you go into medicine, you have lots of choices: allergist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, podiatrist, brain surgery, neurosurgery, cardiac specialist – the choices just go on. Just bypass OB-GYN as a specialty, and you’ll do fine. Your conscience won’t twinge, you won’t have a reason to grandstand in public – oh. Well, maybe you’ll find something else to get your name in the media.
Forget the one and only specialty that gets your panties in an uproar and pick something else. You’ll be happier, we’ll be happier. You get to practice your medicine in comfort and prosperity, but you will have to give up the notoriety of refusing to do your job. It’s a bummer, I know – no monkey-man chest-thumping superiority displays, and no bogus holier-than-thou pronouncements.
Best of all, women will get the healthcare we need and deserve performed by doctors who care about the specialty they’ve chosen – the whole specialty, not cherry-picking bits and pieces of it, and men will get doctors who are paying attention to health issues and not going off grandstanding. Healthcare shold improve for everybody.
”It is very closely focused on abortion and physician’s conscience”
And the patient doesn’t get to seek medical care based upon her needs and conscience? Is Leavitt saying women don’t have a conscience, and therefore need laws and men to tell them what their conscience should be? How – patronizing and utterly inhuman that thought is.
Women have very strong consciences. If we didn’t, a good many of us would walk away from our children when things got tough, really tough. That so few women abandon their children is proof right there, loud and clear, that women have highly developed consciences. When a woman chooses to have an abortion, she’s already given it a great deal of thought – long before she was impregnated by some man, long before she was even capable of being impregnated – and she’ll think about it and ponder the moral and spiritual and ethical issues surrounding it long after she’s past menopause and incapable of childbearing. It consumes us in the most unexpected moments and it’s never far from our thoughts. Anything can trigger it – from a cute little homeless kitten to our best friend’s new baby to our own menstrual cycle.
No woman makes an uninformed choice or a casual choice to abort or keep a baby, or to choose to be sterilized, since that choice is also now at greater risk. Her decision hinges on so many factors men can’t even comprehend because they never will be in a position where they have to make that decision. Men may want to make that decision, may assume the right to make that decision, may even think it is their privilege to make that decision, but they will never, ever be in a place where they have to make that decision and live with it for the rest of their lives. Men do not have to bear any of the consequences of their choice.
They may claim they do, but honestly, as long as they can just walk away from a pregnant woman, can kill a pregnant woman just because they don’t want the child she carries (which I personally find more horrific than an abortion), can beat and abuse and neglect a pregnant woman just because they want to, they will never understand why women must be allowed to make this choice – morally, ethically, spiritually, and physically.
When given the choice, most women will choose to birth the child a man impregnated her with.
Those few women who choose to have multiple abortions, to use abortion as a birth control – do we really want them to be mothers?
What it comes down to in this proposal is that men don’t want women to choose to not be mothers.
This proposal takes away a woman’s right to be childless.
Ebonypearl 
.
If you object to performing certain medical procedures – procedures that are performed almost exclusively by one type of doctor and only one type of doctor – pick a different type of doctor to be.
In all my outrage against doctors who won’t perform their duties to a certain subset of their patients, this never occurred to me — only a very small subset of doctors will be faced with this “conscience problem” — and you don’t have to be that type of doctor.
That’s like, mind-blowing… and so fucking obvious! Why has no one ever pointed this out? I’m borrowing that idea to add to my emails. Thank you so much for helping me educate myself.
.
Comment by starwatcher307 — August 23, 2008 @ 2:10 am
“Why has no one ever pointed this out?”
I dunno. Because it’s so obvious we thought everyone could figure it out for themselves?
Anyway – you heard it. That matters.
We aren’t saying they can’t be doctors, we’re just saying they can’t be OB-GYNs if they don’t like the duties and responsibilities that come with it. There are so many other types of doctor to be.
Comment by ebonypearl — August 23, 2008 @ 2:32 am
It’s not as simple as all that, although it should be. The “conscience” people, when it comes to denying medical care, seem for the most part to choose these careers on purpose as part of a deliberate right-wing medical (and legal) movement. They apparently feel a religious calling to be a certain kind of doctor so that they can treat sinners a certain way; they feel they are acting as warriors for God. To get as far as they have, they are using to their advantage the fear most people have of being seen as discriminating against them for religious reasons.
(Sorry for butting in; got to this post via via .)
Comment by anne_jumps — August 23, 2008 @ 8:12 pm
I know. That’s one important reason why I think such an anti-discrimination regulation is so very, very wrong.
These people have the choice to have a medical career that doesn’t conflict with their morals and ethics, and yet, they are deliberately choosing such a career for, apparently, the sole purpose of denying women safe and complete health care.
It’s why I fight it. I’m not as eloquent or articulate as, but I am as determined.
Comment by ebonypearl — August 23, 2008 @ 9:10 pm
Beautifully written.
Thank you.
((do you mind if this is linked?))
Comment by ilyena_sylph — August 24, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
Thank you.
It’s a public post, please feel free to link if you wish.
Comment by ebonypearl — August 24, 2008 @ 3:50 pm
Aha. So this is happening. Thank you. I’ve been told effectively that “they aren’t that organised.” Yeah, heard that one before.
Comment by smallship1 — August 24, 2008 @ 7:34 pm