According to a story from guttmacher.org, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a host of new regulations purported to enforce over 20 federal provisions related to “conscience and religious freedom.” This new proposal would allow medical personnel at every level to legally refuse to provide health services, treatment, and information under circumstances that they perceive would force them to violate their moral or religious convictions. If implemented, these proposals could have a major impact on standards of care across the board, especially for LGBTQ, and female patients.
The wording of these proposals appears to be intentionally vague, which seems to imply that any person employed or involved the medical system–including volunteers, nurses, contractors, health providers, and trainees–would be included. The extent of services is also remarkably broad in scope, and includes counseling and training; workers could even refuse to give basic factual information to patients. For example, medical staff that refused to give a woman an abortion would not have to tell the patient where she could go to get one.
The gravest concern with the new regulations is that they appear to give medical staff the right to discriminate in providing service. In particular, this could leave the LGBTQ community and reproductive health for women at risk. Such discrimination could quite simply mean the difference between life and death for these patients, particularly if they are dealing with rare disease that can be difficult to diagnose, severely debilitating, and require specialist knowledge to treat. Often, prompt treatment can be critical to achieving successful results and delays to due the withholding of care would be a death sentence.
The regulatory statement from the HHS even calls into question the common sense concept that health providers are obligated to provide treatment to patients in life-threatening, emergency situations. Unfortunately, instances of LGBTQ discrimination in the health system are already not uncommon in the US. For example, as told in Scientific American, doctors told Evan Minton that a hysterectomy was necessary in order to treat his gender dysphoria, a medically verified disorder that a person can experience when their gender identity does not match the gender they were assigned at birth. In a conversation with the hospital, he mentioned that he was transgender. The next day, the hospital had canceled his surgery, citing that hysterectomies were only performed to treat a medical condition. The Trump administration cites Minton’s case as an example of the need to protect the health provider’s refusal of care under the thin guise of “conscience rights.”
We already live in a country where LGBTQ people live in fear of seeking medical attention because of concerns about neglect or discrimination from doctors and hospitals. Meanwhile, it is already a major challenge for women to get an abortion or contraceptives. The new regulations are a blatant attempt to encourage bigotry against women and the LGBTQ community in a field where lives hang in the balance. The new rule does not protect religious or ethical rights, but instead blurs the line between church and state and would force people of an endless variety of religious, cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds to be subject to needless harm and suffering based on ideological dogma to which they do not subscribe.
If you believe that medical personnel should always #PutPatientsFirst, you can submit a public comment here. You can also sign the ACLU petition here, tweet with the #PutPatientsFirst hashtag, or send your message to the National Women’s Law Center.
