Numerous doctors throughout the United States are now refusing to utilize any products offered by the pharmaceutical industry, based on religious conviction that God will heal the faithful. A doctor recently responded to multiple complaints to the American Meidcal Association that his professional diagnosis for at least fifteen cancer patients was vigorous prayer. Incidentally, all of the patients succumbed to their illnesses.
Okay, to the best of my knowledge none of the stuff I just described has actually happened. I made the whole thing up (I hope).
But there are doctors who refuse certain types of treatment based on their own religious beliefs, and the law protects their right to not do their job. Now, if someone has a moral objection to a particular procedure and does not want to perform it, that is fine and dandy–so a person who morally opposes the morning-after pill might want to stay away from jobs where there is a high likelihood of treating recent rape victims. Likewise, someone who opposes contraception but really loves being a pharmacist might consider passing off those customers to another pharmacist.
It is also important to note that I am not even talking about abortion here, but rather contraceptive services, involving prevention of fertilization of an egg or implantation of a fertilized zygote. None of these events yet involve a distinct biological entity–I could go on about how many fertilized zygotes never actually reach their destination of the uterine wall anyway, so if keeping a zygote from implantation is murder, the Mother Nature is the greatest murderess of the all. But that is rather beside the point.
Generally, the women (it’s always women) who are denied services are allowed to seek treatment elsewhere, but they lose crucial time in seeking out a doctor or pharmacist who will leave the women’s decisions to herself and do his or her job.
I suppose an analogy in my own life, being a lawyer, might involve certain criminal offenses. I do not practice criminal law at all, but even if I did, I would be uncomfortable representing someone charged with, say, sexual abuse of a child. Nothing in my professional duties requires me to take this person’s case, but I also cannot do anything to delay him (or her) from seeking counsel elsewhere. The timeframe in law is also much longer than it often is in medicine, so this person would likely have time to find another lawyer–out of professional courtesy, I would probably provide names of some good criminal defense attorneys.
Maybe a better analogy is a doctor who holds deeply-held religious convictions that homosexuality is wrong and a mortal sin, etc., etc. If that doctor comes upon a homosexual who has been shot in the gut and is slowly bleeding to death, can that doctor just walk on and not render any sort of aid? Can that doctor refuse to treat that person if he/she is brought into his ER? How far as a society are we going to take the coddling of people’s religious beliefs when it conflicts with the jobs they studied, trained, applied, and interviewed for, and are quite frankly luck to have?
