It has been standard practice for some time that hospital personnel who do not wish to participate in objectionable procedures, especially abortions, may refuse to do so. That hasn’t presented a problem because hospital staffing can usually be managed to avoid such conflicts (those who have refused in emergency cases have been disciplined). Increasingly, though, every blowhard with an opinion about other people’s healthcare has been coming forward to demand a “conscience-clause” exception to providing services they object to to people in need: the best-known are pharmacists who now demand the right to choose whether patients can have their contraception or medical-abortion prescriptions filled. Given the time-limited nature of these treatments, and the third-party stance of the pharmacist to the patient’s actual medical treatment and decisionmaking process, these refusals have come in for criticism, usually on grounds that such refusals violate the professional obligations of the pharmacist. Since the pharmacists have put themselves in a position of being gatekeepers to patient treatment, they may not then refuse to open the gate on personal whim.

With that debate shaping up nicely, a seeming counterexample popped up unexpectedly: two California physicians, on call to participate in a judicial execution, recently refused to do so on ethical grounds; the execution was postponed for several months at least. Most observers applauded this action. Some asked why physicians should be lauded for holding up a death sentence while pharmacists were excoriated for refusing birth control (which, in their more hyperventilated moments, they regard as equivalent to a death sentence for tiny pre-born citizens). The highly-regarded legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick had a widely-commented-on take on the issue in Slate last week, but I think there’s more to be said.

(more…)

Some more meta-bloggin’:

Taking my friend Angus’s suggestions, I’ve started putting jump tags on blog entries to de-clutter the front page and give casual browsers more to choose from. Read the whole things, though.

I’ve also started SiteMeter monitoring, revealing a slow trickle of visitors I wasn’t aware of. Thanks! Do come back again!

SiteMeter reveals that a good number of people are hitting older blog posts, presumably after searching for specific topics. That’s great. Note that comments are closed on old posts after a certain period of time; I’m sorry for this policy but had to adopt it to try to keep comment spam manageable. (Unfortunately, keyword spam-blocking doesn’t work very well on this blog, because so much spam uses medically-related terms - “viagra”, “cialis”, “erection” . . . - that could conceivably be the subject of a legitimate comment!) So if you see an older post you’re interested in commenting on, drop me an e-mail - we can start a new thread.

As for comments in general, please feel free to leave them. I suspect this (still small) community of readers harbors a lot of intelligent and informed people, and I’d like to get a dialog going. It also helps a lot to know there are people out there reading the material; until I started SiteMeter I honestly though nobody at all was coming by. I tend to offer “the final word” on things in my posts, but that’s just me. Feel free to disagree, criticize, or suggest a new perspective; I’d like to hear from you.

Thanks for dropping by!