Religion Is Not An Excuse For Refusing to Give Medical Care

Posted by
Jill Filipovic, Feministe at 12:54 PM on June 5, 2008.
We’ve all heard the stories about the
nutbag pharmacists, nurses and doctors who refuse to provide women with
adequate health care because of their “religion.” Women are refused
emergency contraception, and even standard birth control pills and
devices, with alarming regularity. Anti-choice groups have pushed for
“conscious clauses” in state law, allowing medical professionals to
refuse to do their jobs.
But it’s not just about contraception any more: It’s also about the right to have children. Pamela
reports that a woman in California was refused IVF treatment by a
doctor who said that treating her would be against his religion.
Now
why in the world would a doctor who disagrees with IVF be working at a
fertility clinic, you ask? Because he doesn’t oppose IVF, exactly — he
just doesn’t like lesbians, and this woman happened to be one.

But
at least they’re being honest here: It’s not about “life.” It’s not
about babies. It’s about social control. It’s about whose lives are
deemed worthy, and which choices fit into the narrow worldview of
religious conservatives. The “pro-life” opposition to abortion and contraception doesn’t come from a serious concern for all those fertilized egg-babies
out there; it comes out of a concern for changing gender roles, and the
evolution of the family into a unit that is increasingly
non-patriarchal, egalitarian and diverse. It’s very much about a class
of viewpoints: The feminist/humanist/scientific/modern view, which
wants to allow individuals the right to self-determination, and the
conservative/regressive view, which wants to take us back to a Golden
Era of the family that never actually existed in real life, wherein men
were in charge and women knew their place.


It’s a vision that most people in this country don’t want —
which is why anti-choicers and conservatives have to hang their
arguments on abortion and babies. But as this case shows, it’s not
about that at all. It’s about flat-out hostility towards women who buck
the role these men would like to pin on them....
More in the link Provided. I don't know what else to say except "Exactly". You put your feelings to the side when you do this kind of work. It's not about you the health care provider. We are suppose to do what they want done or need done, and that is just it, no whining, no objecting, you do it.