Doctor’s Orders, Doctor’s Decrees

How much power do your doctor’s religious beliefs hold over your uterus?

When Guadalupe Benitez, a lesbian, wanted to become pregnant and raise a child with her partner, two California physicians cited religious objections when they refused to artificially inseminate her. Benitez was initially “told by Dr. Christine Brody that Brody would not perform a certain type of artificial insemination procedure because it was against her religious beliefs to do the procedure on a lesbian.” Since California law does make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation, the doctors now claim that their refusal was based solely on her un-wed status. The good doctors might be protected by this linguistic shift, since “[a]t the time, marital status was not protected under the Unruh Civil Rights Law, which covers discrimination by businesses, though sexual orientation was.” By this logic, doctors will be able to deny lesbians this procedure as often as they’d like, since most states already refuse lesbian couples the right to wed. The matter will soon be up to the California Supreme Court, but according to an appeals court ruling in favor of the doctors, “there was a ‘triable issue of fact’ as to whether the refusal by the physicians to inseminate Guadalupe Benitez was based on her marital status and not her sexual orientation.”

Just to be clear, what is being determined is not if doctors can deny women legal medical procedures under the claim of religious objection. They can. What is shocking, however, is the extent to which this power over patients is written into our laws. According to the Gunttmacher Institute:

-46 states allow some health care providers to refuse to provide abortion services.

-All of these states permit individual health care providers to refuse to provide abortion services.

-43 states allow health care institutions to refuse to provide abortion services, 15 limit the exemption to private health care institutions and 1 state allows only religious health care entities to refuse to provide such care.

-13 states allow some health care providers to refuse to provide services related to contraception.

-8 states allow individual health care providers to refuse to provide services related to contraception

-4 states explicitly permit pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraceptives. (4 additional states have broad refusal clauses that do not specifically include pharmacists, but may apply to them.)

-1 state explicitly permit pharmacies to refuse to dispense contraceptives.

-4 states have broad refusal clauses that do not specifically include pharmacies, but may apply to them.

-9 states allow health care institutions to refuse to provide services related to contraception, 6 states limit the exemption to private entities.

-17 states allow some health care providers to refuse to provide sterilization services.

-16 states allow individual health care providers to refuse to provide sterilization services.

-15 states allow health care institutions to refuse to provide sterilization services; 4 limit the exemption to private entities.

So, how much power do your doctor’s religious beliefs hold over your uterus? Almost as much as you do.

via Feministing