Sleepycatz

Do No Harm

Some time ago, I wrote about whether or not health care workers should be allowed to withhold services or treatment due to moral or religious beliefs. My belief remains that health care providers should not be allowed to assert their own morality on to the patient — as long as the patient has expressed informed consent. This has come to mind again with Guadalupe Benitez’s appeal to the California Supreme Court. In 2000, Benitez was refused artificial insemination by her fertility doctors because she was a lesbian. In the first legal action, the court held that the doctor’s religious beliefs took precedence over Benitez’s desire for a child.

Much of what has been written on this case focuses either on the right to procreate, or the physician’s right to invoke objection of conscious. Neither of these arguments address the real concerns for society which underlines the case. For instance, what if Benitez was seeking a prosthetic leg and the doctor refused, either because he did not treat lesbians or because he felt that the injury which took her natural leg was a punishment from God, and he cannot in faith interfere with divine judgment? Certainly, one can live without either a prosthesis or a child, and obviously the right to a prosthesis is less personal then the right to procreate. However, in both cases the physician declares a Benitez less worthy of his or her medical care. The natural extension of this is a fractured society in which balkanized groups of citizens are unable to interact due to “moral objections”. If a doctor can refuse elective treatment based upon his religious judgment of the patient, why can’t a Muslim professor refuse to allow an atheist in his class? Why can’t a Baptist lawyer refuse to represent a Catholic? Why can’t a Mormon optician refuse to fit anyone other than Mormons? All of these are of median value when compared to medical care.

Doctors and nurses hold a special place in our society. They are charged with caring for their fellow women and men with the primary charge of first doing no harm. To allow them to pick and choose treatments and patients based upon their religious faith irreparably harms our society. It allows them to designate a class of citizens as less worthy then others. It fosters an inherent conflict between people of differing religious beliefs and values: the same type of conflict which has ravaged nations since the first prophet appeared from a desert. If we are going to abandon the notion of a pluralistic society then we must be prepared for the bigotry and violence that will eventually ensue. The doctors who refused to treat Guadalupe Benitez placed their moral outrage over the sworn duty of their profession: to first do no harm.

This entry was posted by steve on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Injustices, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.