Tara Rule says her doctor in upstate New York was “determined to protect a hypothetical fetus" instead of helping her treat debilitating pain.
I don’t understand why this is even allowed. If someone had a religious opposition to consuming or enabling the consumption (cooking, serving, etc) of certain foods – shellfish, pork, sweets during lent, meat in general, whatever – that person could not reasonably expect to get a job in a restaurant where that food is regularly served. Like, if a waiter showed up for work at a steakhouse one day and refused to touch any plate with meat on it on religious grounds, no one would be on that waiter’s side when there are vegan restaurants that waiter could have applied to instead.
Doctors are held to a different standard because… the mental gymnastics say it’s totally fine when it’s a woman being denied service I guess?
If these healthcare “professionals” only want to treat men like they deserve humane care, they should be in a field more suited to their preferences.
Failing that, yes, I agree with your comment entirely.
I’m going to try again (and you know, maybe I’m just wrong but here’s what I’m seeing).
There are doctors in the medical field already, with specific beliefs that may be sexist but are not generally speaking, sexist people. There is also a shortage of doctors.
Do we really want to throw out an entire doctor (that takes years of training) because they don’t want to do a particular procedure?
There is a secondary point of when is refusal to do a procedure sexism or religion vs genuine medical objection to the harms caused (in their medical opinion).
There is an additional point where I fundamentally think legal compulsion is a terrible tool in a free society and should be used as an absolute last resort.
When it comes down to something as sensitive as medicine, I’d rather my doctor be on board or I find a different doctor vs my doctor being compelled to do something they don’t believe in or outright having no doctor to go to because … there aren’t enough.
There’s also the possibility (and it seems like in the video) that the Roe v Wade issue is also making this doctor far more skiddish even in New York State. We really haven’t heard his side and that really is an important perspective.
Surely there’s somebody else this woman could see as well? There’s no way this guy is the only one that knows about these medications and maybe another doctor would like to use a different medication anyways. There are plenty of other cases of doctors saying “you’re fine” to people regardless of gender or sex and them needing to see a different doctor before getting the right treatment.
I originally went after your analogy because it’s so beyond comparison. You might as well make an analogy between a rocket scientist and a scientologist. There are so many layers of nuance here. Driving politics into medical decisions is part of how we got here … is adding more complex “do I need a lawyer (to do what I believe is the best practice)” to a doctor’s practice really a good idea?
That presumably kind of worked for racism but I still can’t imagine the truly racist doctors were giving their best service; like we didn’t just say “you must see black patients or leave medicine” and then the problems were fixed. There are plenty of black people alive today that still distrust the institution of medicine – including my neighbor who refused to get vaccinated because he doesn’t trust doctors – because of what’s been done in the past.
Analogies are tools to assist understanding, and having opposition debate the analogies themselves instead of the actual points they’re used to make is a sign of a weak rebuttal.
So let’s ignore all the haggling over the analogy and bring it back to the broader point: People should not be in jobs which their personal beliefs prevent doing significant or important aspects of. And equality between genders is objectively an important aspect of health care. These “professionals” should not be in the health care field at all, save perhaps male-focused care fields like prostate or testicular health.
