Christian EMT Workers Allowed to Let Pregnant Women Die?

So-called "conscience clauses" which allow medical professionals to refuse to treat or help people when the treatment violates one's religious beliefs are sometimes written so broadly that they easily put the public's health in danger. It can be possible for absolutely any healthcare worker to refuse to do absolutely any task — even standard aspects of their jobs — if they have absolutely any moral objections at all. In some of these laws, there is no provision whatsoever made for the rights, needs, or health of the patients. How long will it be before someone dies?

According to [Francis] Manion [ofthe American Center for Law & Justice], the technician, Stephanie Adamson, said her Christian beliefs prevented her from transporting the woman, who had abdominal pain, for an elective abortion. She is suing the ambulance company, Superior Ambulance Co. of Elmhurst, Ill., claiming religious discrimination. Adamson v. Superior Ambulance Service, No. 04 C 3247 (N.D. Ill.).

Manion argues that the elective abortion was not an emergency situation. "Why did she need to go by ambulance to an abortion clinic? If she was truly in a medical emergency, why wasn't she taken care of downstairs [in the hospital emergency room]? Manion said. ...

Manion said that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal statute that prohibits religious discrimination by private companies, the ambulance company was obligated to accommodate Adamson's beliefs.

Manion also noted that Adamson's case is being tried in Illinois, which has one of the broadest health care refusal statutes, also known as "conscience clauses," in the country. The Illinois law is not limited to abortion, and allows any health care professional to opt out of any procedure to which they have moral objections.

Source: Gordon & Rees, LLP

According to Manion's reading of Illinois' "conscience clause," it really wouldn’t matter if the abortion were an emergency, would it? If Stephanie Adamson had a moral objection to transporting someone for an abortion, it wouldn't matter if the abortion were purely elective or absolutely necessary to save the woman's life — a moral objection is sufficient to allow her to refuse to lift a finger to save the woman's life. Questioning whether the abortion was an "emergency" strikes me as little more than an attempt to cast aspersions on the motives of the woman who was, he acknowledges, in pain and thus in need of medical treatment.

Even if we ignore this, though, the question is pretty easy to answer: not all hospitals offer abortion services and, even if they do, there might be someone else better qualified to either perform an abortion or to perform an abortion on women in particular medical circumstances. There are plenty of good medical reasons for why it might be necessary to transport a woman in pain from a hospital to a clinic where she can get an abortion. There are few, if any, good medical reasons for an EMT to refuse to transport a woman in such a situation. There are no good reasons — medical or moral — to give EMTs the right to let a woman die rather than drive her to where her life can be saved.

It's not just about allowing pregnant women suffer and die, though. It's also about preventing women from receiving a wide variety of basic medications:

In fact, there have already been documented cases of "moral refusal" of Accutane based on the requirement persons using the drug use birth control... "moral refusal" goes far beyond just refusing to fill "the Pill" and Plan B. As I've written before, "moral refusal" of any prescription from women's clinics has been documented--even those prescriptions that are explicitly for support of a pregnancy to term such as pregnancy-related vitamins.

In addition, refusal of antibiotics prescribed by women's clinics have been documented, as have refusals of medication that can be used for treatment of genital herpes (and also has applications of treatment of stuff NOT for genital herpes--like, oh, chickenpox in adults or immunosuppressed kids, or people exposed to simian herpes B virus--both of which can kill, and kill in particularly grotesque manner).

Source: Daily Kos

Thus the medical needs of women are being subordinated to the misogynistic religious beliefs of a group of Christians who seek to define all of society by their own narrow doctrines. When you advocate policies which lead to increased suffering, illness, deaths for women — not men, just women — then your position can only be described as misogynistic. It's not merely "sexist" in the sense of discriminatory, but misogynistic in the sense of displaying real hostility towards and hatred of women.