THE DAILY BLADE: When A Patient’s Rights Stop Where A Healthcare Provider’s Rights Begin: Part II
Later this year, the California Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in a case that will weigh a doctor’s religious convictions against a patient’s right to treatment (second item, The Daily Blade, February 12, 2007).
Drs. Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton, of North Coast Women's Care Medical Group in Vista, CA, were sued by Guadalupe Benitez, a lesbian, when they refused to provide her with artificial insemination because helping impregnate an unmarried woman violated their Christian beliefs. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case after a state appeal court ruled in 2005 that Drs. Brody and Fenton, sued should be allowed to present their religious objection defense to jurors, The Recorder reports.
To date, 40 groups have filed amicus curiae briefs, either individually or jointly. Of these, 24 amici are medical groups supporting patient’s rights and liberal civil rights groups supporting gay, women’s and immigrant’s rights, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. The other amici are pro-life and Christian, Islamic and Jewish groups or conservative public interest firms such as the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center.
Several amici argue that the Hippocratic Oath does not require doctors to ignore their religious convictions:
"A medical profession free of conscience is indeed a frightening prospect," Chicago lawyer Mailee Smith wrote for the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, Physicians for Life and the American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. …
[F]ormer U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III … who filed a brief on behalf of the Virginia-based American Civil Rights Union call for a middle road that would let doctors with religious objections refer patients to others.
Though Meese’s compromise seems a reasonable accommodation to both sides of the controversial issue, pro-gay groups are not willing to meet healthcare providers halfway:
"If physicians were permitted ... to refuse to treat a patient simply because a medically irrelevant personal characteristic of that patient - his or her skin color or gender or religion - conflicted with the physician's own moral and religious values," Morrison & Foerster partner Angela Padilla wrote for the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association and others, "a widespread inability of certain patients to obtain medical care would inevitably ensue." …
Ironically, the argument "a widespread inability of certain patients to obtain medical care would inevitably ensue" would also apply to a "Sicko" system of healthcare delivery. But The Stiletto doesn’t expect the coalition of groups who favor violating the religious expression rights of healthcare providers to use this argument to oppose socialized medicine.
Correction: The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) blog picked up this post, and pointed out that the article from The Recorder that The Stiletto cited is inaccurate on one point:
The ACRU is not proposing a "compromise" solution; we are simply defending the right of the defendant and citing the facts of what she did do. She actually was much more accommodating to the would-be patient than she needed to be.
Help Wanting
Five years ago, restaurateur Antonios Podias, 40, was riding his motorcycle home around 2 a.m. on the Garden State Parkway in Holmdel, NJ when Monmouth University student Michael Mairs lost control of his car and clipped the back of the motorcycle.
Podias lay in the middle of the roadway unconscious. There were no witnesses to the accident, and instead of pulling Podias to the shoulder of the road and calling 911 Mairs and his two passengers, Andrew Swanson and Kyle Newell got the heck out of Dodge. A short time later, another car ran over the biker and killed him.
Between them, the three 18-years olds made a 44 calls in the next 2 1/2 hours - to a friend, a girlfriend and a roommate - but none to the police.
Mairs was sentenced to three years in state prison last year after pleading guilty to leaving the scene of a fatal accident. Last July he settled a civil suit with Podias' widow for $1.07 million.
During the civil proceeding, Swanson testified that he "didn't feel responsible to call the police" and Newell, said he just "didn't want to get in trouble." Superior Court Judge Court Edward Oles dismissed Swanson and Newell from the civil suit, finding they did not have a duty to help someone whose injury they did not cause.
Two weeks ago, Appellate Division Judge Anthony Parrillo reinstated the case against the two passengers on the grounds that in this situation, they were not "innocent bystanders." In his opinion, Parrillo wrote:
"The ultimate consequence wrought by the harm in this case - death - came at the expense of failing to take simple precautions at little if any cost or inconvenience to defendants. In other words, (the passengers) had both the opportunity and ability to help prevent an obviously foreseeable risk of severe and potentially fatal consequence."
So there you have it: It took two court cases to establish that a witness to an accident has an obligation to help the victim, and to call the police or EMS. Once upon a time, this was called "Doing The Right Thing."
Lest you’re tempted to dismiss the callous, selfish behavior of these three teenagers as being due to youth and fear, consider how many adults are equally likely to be utterly lacking altruism, empathy and basic human decency these days:
† It was broad daylight when a gun battle suddenly erupted between gang members. At least 20 people at the Wilson-Haverstick housing project in Trenton, NJ, saw the stray .45-caliber bullet that struck 7-year-old Tajahnique Lee in the face with enough force to knock her off her bike. Fifteen months later, the case remains unsolved because none of them will testify or even talk to investigators. "One woman standing 10 feet away told the police she had been too distracted by her young son to see who fired the shots," reports The New York Times. "A man who was also in the courtyard … told detectives he had been engrossed in conversation with neighbors and ducked too quickly to notice what had happened."
† LaShanda Calloway, 27, was stabbed during a fracas at a convenience store in Wichita, KS on June 23rd. As she lay dying on the floor, five shoppers stepped over her body – and one of them snapped a photo of her with her cell phone. It took about two minutes for someone to call 911, and Calloway later died in the hospital. The D.A.’s office is contemplating what, if any, charges can be brought against the shoppers; there is no state statute that covers this situation.
† A woman who lives in Dover, DE, recently wrote Dear Abby to share "a horrifying story." Her husband and his co-workers were in their truck waiting for the light to change when they saw a woman fall out of her wheelchair. Nearly 20 pedestrians walked by. By the time the men were able to get to her and help, she was "extremely embarrassed to have been on the ground so long."
† Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker, the 31-year old TB patient who was quarantined in the US after public health officials chased him around the world trying to get him into isolation so he would not endanger anyone’s health, is taking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to task for misdiagnosing him with an extreme drug resistant form of the disease (XDR-T). Further testing established that he has a multi-drug resistant strain (MDR-T), instead. Though MDR-TB can be treated with a wider range of antibiotics, the CDC says its actions were "sound and appropriate," and that the public health response should be the same for both forms of TB. Imagine, Speaker exposes dozens of people to TB by hopping on one airplane to another, but he wants the CDC to apologize to him.
Whether single parent or dual wage-earning families, schools from elementary to university level teaching moral relativism or various denominations torn asunder over child sex abuse scandals or ordination of homosexuals, the institutions upon which society has relied to give children a solid moral grounding have become too dysfunctional,distrusted or politicized to do the job.
Teach your children well? Such stories suggest this hell will never go by.
fishbowlLA Picks Up The Stiletto’s Courtney Love Post
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The Stiletto Scoops The Wall Street Journal
Prince Charles Is Carbon Neutral. Now We Are (ROTFL) Amused.
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Carbon Neutral Chic
The Wall Street Journal Online, July 9, 2007
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July 12, 2007
The ACRU Blog wrote:
The ACRU and former attorney general and ACRU Policy Board member Ed Meese are cited in a July 11 article at the Daily Blade: "When A Patient's Rights Stop Where A Healthcare Provider's Rights." One correction though, as this is...
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