Freedom, freedom, who gets the freedom?    - by Groff Schroeder

We hear a lot about the getting government “off our backs,” but not so much about the relentless march of government – especially government sponsored religion - into our pants. Although the 1965 Griswold vs. Connecticut Supreme Court Decision declared a state's arrest of married couples using birth control unconstitutional, the unparalleled successes of “pay for play,” and “pray for play,” politics suggests that birth control opponents could soon return state policing of reproductive practices to the marital bedroom. Meanwhile, despite birth control's proven ability to prevent abortions, opponents successfully employ apparently unethical tactics that deny countless Americans access to birth control every day, no matter what their marital or religious status.

Alleged “conscience rights” grant medical care providers godlike power to provide, or deny, birth control to any patient(s) they choose. These previously unknown “rights” also apparently protect the caregiver from any consequences, be it loss of pay, the assignment of a lesser hospital accreditation – or even the need to provide informed consent. Having a medical provider cite religion while taking control of your most personal medical, sexual, and religious decision-making by denying birth control devices, procedures, or services – then having to pay that provider - appears as a particularly egregious form of forcible financial, religious, and sexual assault.

Although “conscience rights” appear to violate not only religious freedom, but also patient autonomy, medical self determination, and sexual privacy, many pharmacies, religious hospitals, and health care corporations insist that their "religious freedom" trumps the rights guaranteed to the patient by not only numerous medical ethics, but also the Consitution of the United States.  

So who's freedom of religion should be protected in the health care marketplace, the patient's or the caregivers?

Medical caregivers can choose employment situations not involving birth control, are paid, have professional responsibilities, and often have the literal power of life and death over patients. In contrast, patients rarely have choices about seeking medical care, the identity of their caregivers, or the location at which the care is given. Patients are often in plentiful supply and rarely in a position to defend, or even request, their human or civil rights due to illness, financial limitations, and other issues. Furthermore, providers expect patients to pay – even when the provider denies services sought by the patient.

The denial of medical care and the denial of informed consent appear to violate medical ethics. Exercising one's power as a medical care provider to force your patient to comply with your own religious beliefs appears to violate not only medical ethics, but also religious ethics, especially in the context of caregiver power, professional responsibility, and patient trust, helplessness, or imminent death. The practice of granting full accreditation to hospitals denying reproductive care appears deceptive at best and fraudulent at worst. Hospitals and corporations providing health care using admitting contracts omitting the provider's “conscience rights” or other claim(s) of primacy with regard to religious freedom, appear to violate not only the ethic of informed consent – but also the law.

Medical professionals, hospitals, and health care corporations are healthy, paid, and able to defend themselves. In contrast, patients by definition neither paid nor healthy, and as people (not paid professionals or non-human entities), patients rightfully deserve the religious freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

Published August 17, 2011 with the quotation below.  

Those who inprinciple are opposed to birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life. 

Bertrand Russell