Lesbian's Health Endangered By Religious Health Care Provider?

Should gays and lesbians receive the same level of health care that straights receive? One would think that the answer to this would be obvious - what sort of bigot would offer a lower standard of health care to someone because they are gay? Well, the sorts of bigots who, in California, put a lesbian through lengthy and risky fertility treatments, only to withhold insemination at the last minute because of their religious beliefs - beliefs which, by the way, didn't stop them from treating her and taking her money in the previous months.

365gay.com reports:

Guadalupe "Lupita" Benitez was denied fertility treatment by her Southern California health care providers because she is a lesbian. Her discrimination lawsuit was thrown out of state court two years ago, but Benitez won an appeal last year which said patients can sue health care providers who discriminate against them based on their sexual orientation, and federal law does not exempt health care providers from state civil rights laws. That unanimous state appeals court decision set an important precedent as the first ruling of its kind in the nation. With that ruling allowing her to sue, Benitez' case is now back at the trial court.

In the summer of 2000, the North Coast Women's Care Medical Group and doctors Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton refused to inseminate Lupita Benitez after she had received 11 months of preparatory treatment from the clinic, including potentially risky medications and invasive tests. At the critical and brief moment when Benitez needed to be inseminated, both Brody and Fenton said that because of their personal religious beliefs about gay people, they would not administer the treatment Benitez had been promised.

Jennifer C. Pizer, senior staff attorney in Lambda Legal's Western Regional Office, makes what I consider a very important comment: "California licensed these doctors to practice medicine, not religious rituals. They were legally and ethically obligated to provide treatment based on their patient's medical condition, not her identity." This is what makes this situation a textbook case of unfair discrimination: Benitez was treated based upon her identity, not her condition.

Those doctors, in my opinion, violated their basic oaths and simply shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine - in California or any other state, for that matter. Had they refused to accept her as a patient for this voluntary procedure upfront, that might be one thing - but discontinuing treatment at a delicate stage is quite another. I don't believe that they can be trusted to properly and ethically treat any patient they come into contact with because you never know when such a patient will be the "wrong" sort - the sort who they don't consider worthy of the same level of care as everyone else based merely on some facet of their identity like race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. People like that make me sick and ashamed for humanity.

Read More:

• Fundamentalism
• Religious Right
• Religious Intolerance & Bigotry
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality