As I said, I'm not super excited about Martha Coakley, but she is by far the best candidate we have.
I love that she's said that people who refuse to inform patients of safe and legal available treatments shouldn't work in emergency rooms. They shouldn't. I hate that right-wing nutjobs are saying that she's said that Catholics shouldn't work in hospitals. Not at all the same thing, and highly offensive to all the wonderful Catholic healthcare providers out there who provide appropriate and skilled medical care and don't view their job as somewhere where it's OK to violate ethical codes and abuse patients.
We need to look at the issue in terms of the person's proposed actions, not the religion they're claiming is the reason for it. Should a person, for any reason, be an emergency room doc if they're going to choose to neglect to tell patients about safe, legal treatment that's an option for their particular situation? Of course not. What if we take the hot-button issue out of the equation and substitute something more neutral? Try this one:
"I believe it's an abomination to place thread or adhesives on one's body, so even though I'm a surgeon who has been taught in medical school that such things are safe and appropriate, I'm going to say 'oh, too bad that you have a gaping wound that's going to heal badly and get infected' when people come in with injuries, rather than letting them know that we could suture and/or glue it."
Or, what about a physician who's a hard-core 12-step extremist? (I personally have no super strong opinions on 12-step programs, and I do think they save lives, but they also generate a good number of fundamentalists who believe that no person is able to use alcohol or drugs responsibly.) What if the physician refuses to prescribe any drug with addictive potential to any person, citing the (erroneous, based on research) moral belief that any drug leads right to addiction and harm to society?
It doesn't matter what reason someone gives for it; healthcare providers have the ethical responsibility to inform patients about all options for treatment of their particular situation. If they're not willing to do this, they shouldn't have signed on to a profession that requires providers to abide by such ethics. No one is saying "Catholics shouldn't work in emergency rooms." People are saying "providers who refuse to let patients know about the availability of safe and legal treatments are unethical healthcare providers, no matter what reason they give, and they need to quit working in a place where patients are delivered to them on a space-available basis without having consented to being treated based on someone's religious beliefs."
Also, the credentialing organizations need to grow a pair and be more active in defrocking providers who won't abide by established standards. And I say this as a very religious person and a healthcare provider. I've signed onto a code of ethics that requires me to respect THEIR religious beliefs, not one that says it's remotely acceptable for me to insist that patients make decisions based on MY religious beliefs.
I used to work as a clinician in a locked psychiatric hospital. The food there wasn't Kosher. When the kiddos told me they were hungry, I went and got them something to eat, or told them where they could get something, depending on their privileges to move freely around the building. What if I had instead decided to tell them, "oh, sorry, nothing I can do about it," based on my belief that eating Kosher is the right thing to do? That would be extremely wrong of me, right? And it would be abusive, right? If I believed that it was appropriate to deny the children appropriate care based on my religious beliefs, then the appropriate response of the hospital would be to fire me, right?
Is that the same thing as saying that no Jews should work in hospitals? Hardly. All it's saying is that, no matter what I believe personally, I have an ethical obligation to treat my clients appropriately, and it isn't appropriate for me to decide what other people may or may not do because of my beliefs. The first amendment allows me to hold and express my beliefs. It doesn't say I can abuse other people into following my religious practices when they don't believe in them. It also doesn't say that emergency room personnel can go against established practices and decide that someone needs to become impregnated with an egg fertilized by a rapist because it's the provider's religious belief that this is what should happen.
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