Reply #167: c'mon; you've heard of the constitution? [View All]

[iverglas]

It's a bit tricky, so hold onto your hat.

Medicine and pharmacy are self-governing professions. Society gives them the authority to decide who gets to practise the profession, what qualifications are required in order to practise the profession, and what sort of conduct will get someone expelled from the profession.

Society gives professionals these powers because of their special expertise, and requires that the powers be exercised in the public interest.

There are laws in our societies that prohibit people who provide services to the public from discriminating against customers/clients/patients on a number of grounds. Where I'm at, at least, those grounds include sex and religion.

A doctor who refuses to provide services to a woman because the services she wants, which are legal and which are recognized medical services to deal with matters that only medical professionals are permitted to deal with, and which the medical profession authorizes the provision of by its members, because they offend the doctor's religious beliefs, is violating anti-discrimination laws. (Read also "or pharmacist who refuses to dispense properly prescribed medications for which there is no contra-indication that the pharmacist has a professional duty to inquire into".)

In addition, the services that the woman is seeking are specific to women and to the health issues of women. The ability to control our reproductive functions is crucial to women's equal participation in all spheres of society. Women who are denied that ability are placed in an unequal position. Professionals who refuse to provide recognized medically appropriate, legal services to women and only women are discriminating against women.

Doctors and pharmacists who engage in this kind of behaviour should be brought before whatever civil/human rights tribunal is available, by every patient on whom they impose their loony vicious private rules.

But it goes farther than that.

The governing bodies of the professions (not, e.g., the American Medical Association, which is a voluntary association to promote doctors' own interests, but something like a state board of examiners, in Canada a "college") is acting as an agent of the state when it exercises its statutory powers to restrict admission to the profession, regulate the conduct of its members and bar members from practising.

If it permits its members to deny services for discriminatory reasons, it is permitting them to violate both the law and the profession's ethics (which, you can be sure, do not permit discrimination by doctors who just don't like people of colour and refuse to treat them, for instance).

As an agent of the state, the governing body's decisions are subject to judicial review. (They are here, and I can't imagine they would not be in the US.) A doctor who was denied a license to practice because *s/he* was a woman or person of colour ... or fundamentalist christian ... would have the governing body in court in a heartbeat.

Why should a patient who was denied service because she is a woman, or *not* a fundamentalist christian, not be able to do the same thing? First, complain to the governing body of the medical profession, of course -- and if there's no joy forthcoming, take the bastards to court.

If their rules permit that kind of discrimination, their rules are a violation of the rights in that 14th amendment to the US constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Where a doctor denies a woman medical services for discriminatory reasons, and the professional body, on behalf of the state, permits that denial, it is denying that woman the equal protection of the laws that require non-discriminatory provision of services.

Just exactly as if the cop on the corner refused to come to your aid because you were a person of colour, or a fundamentalist christian, and the police service failed to require that its employees stop discriminating in the provision of services.

Who else but women is ever expected to put up with this kind of shit? Who else but women would ever be told that the conscience, or morals, or religion, of a member of a group that provides a service that the state requires she obtain from that group prevail over her right to the equal protection of the law?

What *does* make the conscience, or morals, or religion, of some loony vicious doctor or pharmacist more important than *her* rights, but not more important than the rights of someone in need of a blood transfusion who encounters a JoHo doctor, or a person of colour in need of cough syrup who encounters a racist pharmacist?? Racists have scruples too, you know.

If these people don't like doing what the medical profession and only the medical profession (or pharmacists and only pharmacists) are empowered by law to do, then they should find other jobs.

We don't even say to people looking to buy a sandwich that if the local lunch counter doesn't want to serve, say, Buddhists, because the owner has a firm and genuine religious conviction that Buddhists are agents of Satan, they're free to go find another lunch counter somewhere else that will serve them.

A lot of women don't have a lot of choice when it comes to finding a doctor or pharmacist. They may be in small communities, they may be tied to certain providers by their insurance company or HMO. They may need emergency contraception and have a small window of time in which to get it. They may be completely unable to obtain a legal, recognized-appropriate medical service, or fill a legal prescription, because the source they have no option but to try to obtain it from is a loony vicious asshole.

Now I'm not saying that anybody with these alleged scruples is a loony vicious asshole. I'm saying that anybody who advances them as justification for denying women legal, appropriate medical services is a loony vicious asshole.

Doctors do indeed have rights. And those rights include the right to leave the profession if they don't like the rules.