Category: United States

American Civil Liberties Union: referral for abortion not good enough

Sean Murphy*

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing a Washington state public hospital district, claiming that it is failing to provide medical and surgical abortions.  In fact, the hospital district provides both, but refers patients to other facilities for abortion when they cannot be provided in one of the district hospitals because of conscientious objection to the procedure by staff.  It thus appears that the ACLU is not content with forcing facilities to refer for abortion, but intends to force them to provide the procedure despite conscientious objection by physicians and health care workers.  [Reuters]

 

Pediatrician won’t treat baby with 2 moms

 USA Today

Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press

DETROIT  –  Sitting in the pediatrician’s office with their 6-day-old daughter, the two moms couldn’t wait to meet the doctor they had picked out months before.

The Roseville, Mich., pediatrician  –  one of many they had interviewed  –  seemed the perfect fit: She took a holistic approach to treating children. She used natural oils and probiotics. And she knew they were lesbians.

But as Jami and Krista Contreras sat in the exam room, waiting to be seen for their newborn’s first checkup, another pediatrician entered the room and delivered a major blow: The doctor they were hoping for had a change of heart. After “much prayer,” she decided that she couldn’t treat their baby because they are lesbians. [Full text]

 

Dying Dutch: Euthanasia Spreads Across Europe

Newsweek

Winston Ross

In one of the last photographs my family took of my grandmother, she looks as if she’s been in a fistfight. Jean Bass Tinsley is lying in a hospital bed in Athens, Georgia, wearing a turquoise button-up shirt and staring blankly at the camera. A bandage obscures her fractured skull, along with the bridge of her bloodied nose. She is 91 years old.

My grandmother essentially did this to herself. In June 2013, she fell out of her wheelchair headfirst, after ignoring her caregivers’ warnings not to get out of bed without help. Earlier that year, she’d broken both of her hips, in separate falls. Before that, her pelvis-all while trying to do what for most of her life she’d managed just fine on her own: walk.

In her last year, dementia crept into my grandmother’s mind. The staff at her long-term-care facility plotted ways to protect her from herself. It’s against the law in Georgia to restrain patients in such facilities, so they lowered her bed to the floor and put a pad down next to it. They even installed an alarm that went off if she left her mattress. My grandmother disabled the alarm, moved the pad and freed herself, repeatedly. In the end, she was both too weak and too strong. [Full text]

 

Why I support some religious exemptions (though I myself am not religious)

Washington Post

Eugene Volokh

Should the law sometimes exempt religious objectors from generally applicable laws? And, if so, should it be done (1) only on a statute-by-statute basis — where the legislature decides, when it passes or revises a statute, whether there ought to be an exemption from that statute — (2) through a broad exemption law, which calls on courts to decide when to carve out religious exemptions from a statute and when not to, or (3) as a matter of constitutional command, interpreting the Free Exercise Clause as presumptively (but not categorically) mandating religious exemptions?

I’m inclined to conclude that the best solution is a mix of (1) and (2) — legislatures create exemptions when they think of them, but also authorize courts to do the same — but generally without the constitutional model (3). I discuss this in much more detail in my “A Common Law Model for Religious Exemptions” article, but here I just want to focus on part of that: why I think religious exemptions are often a good idea, even though I myself am not religious. . . .[Full text]

 

Clarifying Our Terms for 2015

Catholic moral theology has a great way to sift through some of the hardest moral debates.

Aleteia
Reproduced with permission

Mark Gordon*

Two-thousand-fourteen was a contentious year in the Catholic community as debates on a variety of issues divided the faithful. In the 2014 election, 54% of self-described Catholics voted for Republicans, with that number rising to 60% among white Catholics.  Healthcare and immigration reform, Common Core education standards, religious liberty, American foreign policy – including the torture debate – and even the normalization of relations with Cuba all provided fodder for often acrimonious food fights among Catholics. . . Catholics who engage one another on these and other issues usually rely on arguments that sound valid on the surface, but which are in fact misunderstandings, if not deliberate distortions, of Catholic teaching. [Full text]