False Dichotomies

As you may learn, I'm usually the one who goes soft on religion around here, but not when it fucks with people's health and lives. Today the issue is doctors denying certain treatments to patients for religious reasons. Particularly contraceptives, abortions, and other procedures related to women's health. There are a few issues here, so let's address them one at a time. 1: Doctors need to do their jobs. 2: People need to stop telling outright lies about contraceptives. 3: A woman's right to her own body outweighs any imagined injury to a grouping of cells inside her.

Doctors are required to do what patients ask, whether they like it or not, in MANY cases. It ranges from not resuscitating someone they think they could help to throwing out perfectly good organs because the owner was superstitious. This is the case for any profession. Vegetarians have to serve meat to customers if their establishment serves it or risk losing their job. But doctors in particular have to respect patients' wishes because they're messing with their bodies. That being the case, when does a doctor get the right to not only deny a treatment to a patient, but also refuse to refer the patient to someone who is willing to give the treatment? If you guessed "when it's a woman and she had sex," you'd be right. In Canada, there are even doctors refusing to do pap smears on single women for "religious reasons."

For those of you who didn't hear before, most contraceptives do not "kill" any fertilized egg. They generally prevent sperm from reaching an egg. Some do it by storing the sperm somewhere safe until they die or killing the sperm outright. (Don't you try to tell me sperm are humans or I'll tie you down and make you listen to this for a week straight.) And others do it by preventing the egg from being released at all. None of these involve a fertilized egg unless they fail, in which case the woman gets pregnant just as she would normally. Yet somehow people keep trying to claim that contraceptives kill babies. Lots of these lies get spread around in an attempt to make judgment and subjection of women look like some noble campaign for the rights of the unborn. The pap smear issue mentioned above is clear evidence that denial of treatment on religious grounds is synonymous with discrimination against "sinners" because pap smears are done ONLY to detect and prevent cancer and have no relation to contraception. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'll admit that the morning after pill and abortions do involve a zygote (fertilized egg) or fetus being disposed of. There's also an over-blown controversy as to whether some birth control pills can fail, allow an egg to be fertilized, and then prevent it from implanting in the uterus. However, at that point and with the morning after pill we're literally talking about two cells (or one, depending on how you look at it.) If killing them is wrong, we really need to reconsider the morality of antibiotics.

Finally, on to actual abortions. Her body. Her choice. Period. Removing the choice to terminate a pregnancy from the equation puts women in a place of absolute submission to imagined entities and puritanical morality. Yes, the idea of it might bother some folks. A lot of things do. That doesn't give you a right to judge or legislate it. If you're dead set on protecting the unborn, go out and work to reduce the number of abortions the way that we know works. Educate children (and adults) about sex openly and honestly. Improve people's economic stability through support systems, free health care, and better pay. Provide contraceptives to anyone who wants them, whether you like the idea of them having sex or not. Quit trying to make people's choices for them. Outlawing abortions will do nothing but cause more harm. More children will be born into poverty and overpopulation. Women who seek out abortions will die from poor care. Women with at risk pregnancies will die. If you really support the dignity of all human beings, learn the facts and act on them.