The context of this is laws that would require providers to provide certain services, under which such a contract would be deemed illegally opting out (as set forth in the court case linked above). That’s the whole point of this effort.
Is there a law in the US that forces a doctor to perform an abortion or a nurse to participate? Aside from one that says that your employer can ask you to fulfill the terms of your contract or lose your job? It seems that the vast majority of laws limiting physician freedom are being proposed or passed to prevent them from performing abortions, counseling patients about abortion, or discuss guns in the household.
Even in the absence of a specific law, medical providers can always be sued. Part of the push to redefine elective abortion from a right rooted in bodily autonomy to being “routine healthcare” is to open providers to lawsuits for refusing to provide them: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/390968-abortion-refus...
Ah, now you’re reminding me of a case in Ireland where they let the Hindu, not Catholic, patient die because they did not believe in abortion. That is not a scenario I want in my life. Doctors choosing your morals for you and calling it their conscience?
I guess it’s the libertarian thing. Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
Except it’s not just about emergency care. (In that case I’d argue it’s a critical public safety issue.) Advocacy groups are targeting the practice generally, because providers opting out can mean that people have to travel further to get an elective abortion, sterilization, contraception, etc. You don’t have to be all that libertarian to believe that in non-emergency situations, doctors should be able to tell people to go somewhere else to get a procedure the doctor doesn’t wish to perform.
And, of course, since the doctor is also an active participant in killing the fetus, it’s not the “doctor imposing morals in the patient.”
There’s more to it. They often know at 8 weeks that an ectopic pregnancy is there. It won’t be for another 30 weeks that it becomes a problem. So, not really an emergency room situation but something where you might be in the room with your Ob/Gyn. If that person thinks abortion is murder they shouldn’t let you know that other doctors will happily murder your fetus to save you. If you die it’s god’s will. If the baby dies in 30 weeks, that’s also god’s will. You’re saying that the doctor should be held harmless withholding that information?
> If that person thinks abortion is murder they shouldn’t let you know that other doctors will happily murder your fetus to save you. If you die it’s god’s will. If the baby dies in 30 weeks, that’s also god’s will. You’re saying that the doctor should be held harmless withholding that information?
Obviously not. To begin, no religion I’m aware of would preclude informing the patient in that circumstance. And few libertarians believe that individual freedom requires allowing deception of others, as in your hypothetical.
Apart from that, weighing individual liberty interests is always context-dependent. E.g. consider the various wrinkles when it comes to self defense. For a libertarian, forcing doctors to perform a procedure that involves killing something (whatever you think that thing is) in non-emergency circumstances just because that might leave too few people in an area willing to do that probably falls too far on the side of ignoring individual liberty. It’s the basic libertarian position: you may have a right to something, but you don’t have a right to make someone else give you that thing.
