Now that’s tolerant:
Allie Martin OneNewsNow.comApril 9, 2007
An official with the Thomas More Law Center says doctors should be able to refuse to perform medical procedures that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. The Law Center filed a brief in a case pending before the California Supreme Court, North Coast Women’s Care v. Benitez, which involves a homosexual woman who sued two doctors after they refused to artificially inseminate her.
Eventually, the plaintiff, Benitez, and her partner found a doctor who performed the procedure. Brian Rooney with the Thomas More Law Center believes their continuing to press their suit against the physicians proves that homosexual activists want to force others to accept their lifestyle. Read the entire article here.
9 Comments
April 9, 2007 at 8:16 pm
There’s limits to some doctrines of physician autonomy that I respect and embrace. A doctor, for example, who thinks that the mother should always die if it’s between her and her baby is, IMO, overstepping his bounds by making the most personal of decisions. Ditto to doctors who get injunctions to prevent women from, say,, delivering vaginally when they want to foce them into (lucrative) C-sections.
That all said, there’s nothing here that is not solved by the free market. There’s no real time constraints on searching for a physician to perform IVF: if it takes an extra few months to find a doctor, what’s really lost? This isn’t like finding a doctor to perform an emergency appendectomy, after all.
More than that, I REALLY dislike the precedent this would set, which is forcing doctors to perform non-medical abortions.
April 9, 2007 at 9:46 pm
I actually think the woman has a strong case. If the doctor routinely performs this type of operation, the moral basis against this particular patient is not reasonable to deny her care.
The danger in this type of decision is that doctors can cherry pick their patients. An example that comes to mind is a patient has the AIDS virus and shows effects, and the doctor is afraid to perform surgery on the patient for frear of being cut while he is operating. I have a strong sense that he would be found liable.
I know the analogy is not perfect, but the doctor had no medical basis to not perform this operation. This could be an interesting case.
April 9, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Must a doctor perform every medically reasonable operation put before him?
That’s not rhetorical so much as the essence of the issue.
April 11, 2007 at 1:48 am
[...] but may not determine whether life is worthwhile. (This is the conservative flip side to Wytammic’s post on doctors who refused to artificially inseminate a [...]
April 11, 2007 at 8:14 am
I think the case could go either way. This is a case that truly turns on which course hears the arguments. There is enough rhetorical fire on both sides to supply a strong majority and dissent.
My own personal (and humble) opinion is that since this case doesn’t involve saving a life or healing someone who is sick (like in Voice’s analogy), the doctor can’t be forced to perform the procedure. This is much more akin to a plastic surgeon who refuses to perform breast enhancement on a 19 year old girl because he thinks she is too young.
April 11, 2007 at 8:15 am
should say “which court hears the argument.”
April 11, 2007 at 9:53 am
Funny, TT, I thought that this was similar to plastic surgery in terms of physician discretion. Great minds thinking alike and all….
April 11, 2007 at 10:03 am
“Great minds thinking alike and all”
Great now I am getting a big head, and my virtue for the day was supposed to be humility…lol. Guess I need to start that all over again tomorrow.
April 11, 2007 at 10:32 am
Whoops! Find another one for today… chastity? (Will avoid making lewd comments in light of your previous post and how your wife might react to such a declaration this evening.) Temperance?
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