Daniel Summers, a gay pediatrician, has something to say about the new division of HHS designed to protect healthcare workers who refuse to give certain treatments under the grounds of "religious liberty." He pulls no punches and makes no apologies for his rejection of this idea.
In a piece published by The Slate , Summers says the following:
If you are a healthcare provider who doesn’t want to treat LGBTQ people or their families, please don’t waste your time and mine applying for a job in my practice.
. . . Because many people justify their bigotry against gender and sexual minorities in religious terms, this new division is quite alarming news for LGBTQ people. The creation of this division appears to open the door for medical providers to, for example, refuse to provide gender confirmation treatment for trans people, or refuse to treat children with same-sex parents.
One attendee at the ceremony announcing this new division was Sara Hellwege, a nurse-midwife who sued in 2014 after being denied a job at a Florida health center. The reason she didn’t get the job? She admitted that she would refuse to prescribe birth control pills because of her religious beliefs—and prescribing birth control pills was part of the job she applied for.
She had no business seeking the position in the first place.
David Gorski, a surgeon and editor of the website Science-Based Medicine, expressed the views of many medical providers, myself included, when he tweeted that “physicians who refuse to treat certain patients based on their religious beliefs are in the wrong profession and should never have become doctors in the first place.”
. . .If you don’t think same-sex couples should be raising children, you won’t be interacting with families in my practice at all. If you’re not willing to discuss PrEP with your gay male patients, and think HIV prevention funding would be better spent on conversion therapy, you won’t be seeing any patients here. If you’re going to ignore the needs of our trans patients or insist on mis-gendering them, we have no opening here for you. And I don’t care at all if you justify any of that with your religion.
Check out the entire column here.
1 comment:
One of the most powerful statements I've read in a long time. Unfortunately this new Division of "Conscience and Religious Liberty" will gain momentum and influence so long as the current administration is in power.
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