Saying doctors can refuse to treat individuals they don't like can open the door to ethnic cleansing [View All]

[ck4829]

Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1255, also called the Conscientious Objection Act, would absolve medical care providers of liability in cases where reproductive care was denied based on a practitioner's religious or moral beliefs.

Services a provider would be free to withhold, with immunity, include performing an abortion, artificial insemination, and prescribing birth control or emergency contraception (also known as the "morning-after pill").

"There shall be no cause of action against a health care provider for declining to participate in a health care service that violates his or her conscience," the bill reads. "A health care institution that declines to provide or participate in a health care service that violates its conscience," it adds, "shall not be civilly, criminally or administratively liable."

"I intend with this bill," says Senator John Eichelberger (R-Altoona) to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "to make it very clear that people in health care and in medical institutions would be held harmless if they for religious reasons decide not to provide procedures for abortion or contraception."

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Pennsylvania_bill_0217.html

This bill is more than just about abortion or contraception. It could very well allow a doctor to deny treatment to groups of people that he doesn't like.

You have a 'Christian' Hospital and you don't think it's OK to give life saving medical care to gay individuals? "Go for it!" is what this bill is saying.

http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/sb1777.pdf

This brings me to the ethnic cleansing part of this. Ethnic cleansing can be more than rounding up the group and systematically executing them. No, it can be much more subtle than that. There can be administrative acts of ethnic cleansing as well. Things like not letting the target group work, harassing them, and denying them medical care.

Note to people in the medical field: You're here to heal people, not to be the back door to genocide.

Maybe it's time for a new Civil Rights Act, something that will stop attempts to deny people medical treatments.