The Return of Medical Fascism

Anti-religious zealots are heralding the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to compel physicians to provide legal but ethically questionable medical procedures to patients even if those procedures, in particular circumstances, violate the physicians’ ethical or religious beliefs.

The ultimate goal of these zealots and their totalitarian allies in the judiciary is to force America’s estimated 573 Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, distribute abortifacent drugs such as mifepristone (RU-486), and practice sterilization and euthanasia.

In the case before the California Supreme Court, a California obstetrician and gynecologist, Dr. Christine Brody, declined on ethical grounds to provide artificial insemination procedures to a lesbian couple.

The Court ruled that doctors’ constitutional rights to freedom of religion did not trump the state’s antidiscrimination laws. “The 1st Amendment’s right to the free exercise of religion does not exempt defendant physicians here from conforming their conduct to the . . . antidiscrimination requirements,” Justice Joyce L. Kennard wrote.

The reaction among secular fundamentalists was ecstatic

In an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times, Richard P. Sloan, a professor at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, argued that the logic of the California Supreme Court’s opinion should be applied to other medical procedures that some doctors find ethically objectionable – including abortion and what he euphemistically terms “terminal sedation.”

“Almost every state in the nation has legislation permitting healthcare professionals — from physicians to nurses to pharmacists — to deny patients legal medical treatments that they may find religiously objectionable,” he wrote disapprovingly, adding “enough is enough.”

Sloan is particularly incensed that the Bush Administration is proposing a law that would cut off federal funding to any hospital or health plan that does not permit its employees “to opt out of participating in legal medical procedures — including those associated with reproduction and terminal sedation — that they oppose out of religious conviction.”

The new champions of medical fascism, such as the California Supreme Court, emphasize that the procedures that some physicians object to on ethical grounds – including partial birth abortion, the creation of designer babies, and denying food and water to terminal patients – are technically “legal.”

The premise behind their arguments is that anything legal is therefore ethical – and that anything legal can be made compulsory.

But we all know that this is not true: It is legal to gamble away your family’s life savings or cheat on your spouse – and yet few Americans would welcome laws or policies that made such behavior compulsory or would force others to actively assist such behavior.

What’s more, we know from recent history that government officials can certify as “legal” medical practices that most Americans, of any or no religious affiliation, would find repellent.

For example, it wasn’t too long ago in America that government officials could order patients to be forcibly sterilized if physicians deemed them, in their expert medical judgment, “unfit” to procreate.

Thirty-three states had laws not only permitting the practice but actually mandating it. As no less a legal authority than Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, expressing the worldview of many in the judiciary, “three generations of imbeciles is enough (Buck v. Bell, 1927).”

For 40 years, from 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service conspired with medical researchers to trick black workers in Alabama infected with syphilis into believing they were being treated when, in fact, they were really the subject of secret medical experiments.

The doctors, in the name of advancing medical science, wanted to monitor the progress of syphilis when left untreated. More than 100 patients were allowed to die when the administration of ordinary penicillin would have saved their lives.

The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” was legal. In fact, it was conducted by the U.S. government and administered by highly trained MDs. (Although the founder of the study, Dr. Taliaferro Clark, eventually objected to the deceptive practices used — on ethical grounds — and resigned from the program a year after it began.)

Today, many Americans, including many physicians, have grave ethical objections to procedures that secular fundamentalists are not troubled by in the least – such as killing viable human infants who survive abortions, creating designer test-tube babies and eliminating those deemed to have defects, “terminal sedation,” and so on.

The new medical fascists, however, such as the judges on the California Supreme Court, want to compel all physicians to perform these practices and are using anti-discriminations laws as an excuse to do so.

That is something that all freedom-loving Americans, who cherish First Amendment protections of religious liberty, can never tolerate.