As I listened to oral arguments in a case before the Supreme Court concerning Mifepristone, one of two drugs often used in combination, and commonly prescribed by doctors to facilitate abortion, I felt a mix of emotions:
Anger at the thought that denialist doctors and dentists had wormed their way onto the high court’s docket to pitch a case that could force all doctors to abandon evidence-based, and in some cases emergency, medical care to human beings they deemed to be unworthy of the standard of care all doctors take an oath to uphold.
Disbelief about what I was hearing from the counsel for the plaintiffs, who was trying to underscore the harm her clients could endure from merely the thought that they might one day, though some extreme circumstance wherein an anti-choice dentist might be the only medical professional available to treat sepsis in a pregnant woman, have to decide whether the patient had sought an abortion or it had happened spontaneously.
And, finally, a minor amount of relief that at least some of the ideologues on the bench weren’t biting at the line they’d been cast.
But even that feeling is fleeting.
The regulars of this particular fishing trip signaled with their questions how these so-called doctors might one day better land a whopper. Specifically with an antiquated law that governs the mailing of medications.
Isn’t it enough that guardrails for a doctor’s firmly held beliefs have already been erected?
How many women will die before we acknowledge that that live birth is as rare as pregnancy loss is common?
Must we continue to endure the chipping away of healthcare autonomy with legal maneuvers bathed in bad faith? Must we suffer the most invasive procedures when the least invasive ones have been standard care for decades?
We must, evidently, because what they are saying the the court is that they do not want to provide the standard of care to anyone they believe is having complications from a pregnancy loss they don’t consider acceptable, or can’t confirm was not the result of human intervention.
As the plaintiff’s attorney dodged one question in particular, it seems her clients might fear complicity so much that they wouldn’t be willing to hand a bottle of water to a non-religious colleague, let alone perform standard procedures to clear the patient of non-fetal tissue for the prevention of infection or death.
Can we truly believe the harm to a practitioner’s soul would in any way match the harm done to the women they would discriminate against by denying emergency medical care?
In so many of their claims, it seems ensuring that souls endure the most suffering as they experience this “right to life” is the central, though unstated, goal.
I do not believe the majority of us want the sea change in healthcare these fringe doctors are angling for. Nor would we accept such Sisyphean impediments to any other forms of life-saving treatment should our doctors decide the way we consumed food, drank alcohol, or didn’t belong to a church meant we weren’t deserving of righteous care.
And while I am certain these doctors will one day be startled to face a Creator who doesn’t share their belief that using “God-given” talents to deny life-saving care was what she intended, I don’t for an instant think this litigious minority should force the rest of us to turn the other cheek.
At least not when we still have a vote.
writer, photographer, keeper
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