I get my rights, but you can't have yours.

[crysthewolf]

borrowed from mycybertuffet;

--------"Reprinted from this link:

"In a draft of a proposed Federal rule, the Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. Hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools would have to sign “written certifications” that they won't discriminate in any way against people or institutions that oppose abortion or some forms of birth control or refuse to perform them. This includes oral contraception and emergency contraception and is apparently an attempt by the radical religious right to classify oral contraception as abortion. Naturally, the Bush administration is eager to help out.

So, the inner city women's clinic employee who refuses to talk to patients about birth control? Can't touch her. The hospital pharmacist who refuses to fill prescriptions for birth control? She can't be fired or disciplined. The doctor who refuses to give emergency contraception to a rape victim for "religious reasons?" Give that man a promotion."


These regulations are set to be put into practice next week.  Here's your petition: http://www.hillpac.com/action/hhspetition/"

I don't have a problem with anti-abortionists having rights.  I have a problem with them taking them away from other people.  I'm on the fence about requiring pharmacies to hire people who don't believe in birth control.  On the one hand, people have a right to their beliefs.  Now, I think that if you're going to enforce a rule saying that pharmacies HAVE to consider people who don't believe in filling birth control scrips, I think that you should also draw the line at how MANY they are ALLOWED to have on staff.  There HAS to be someone, at all times, who is able to fill any prescription that a doctor prescribes, and if you can't do that, then you can't even think about pulling this shit.  You're taking away medicines that are, under some circumstances, life saving.

Yes, I said life SAVING.  Have you ever heard of ectopic pregnancy?  Situation:  The pharmacy tech in a hospital doesn't believe in abortion or birth control, and a woman comes in suffering from an ectopic pregnancy.  Ectopic pregnancy is where an embryo forms and attaches inside of a fallopian tube.  If the embryo bursts the tube, the woman could DIE.  The only way to SOLVE this problem?  An abortion... specifically, the "morning after" pill.  But the pharmacy tech won't fill the scrip.  And the doc can't do a damned thing about it.

I'm sorry, I respect people's beliefs and all, and I'm not necessarily pro-abortion myself, but it's stupid to become a pharmacy tech when you know full well that there's a prescription you don't want to fill and I think that you should find a job that fits your beliefs considering that you live in a country where birth control and abortion are LEGAL, and therefor you really DON'T have a right to refuse to administer either if you're in a position to do so. 

If your religious beliefs don't allow you to DO YOUR JOB, then PICK ANOTHER CAREER PATH.  How many Amish cable installers do YOU know???

Love,
Crystal

Comments

[friendstephen.livejournal.com]

This is a graphic example of two contradictory principles:

Principle One: If you become a cop who might conceivably be posted to a gambling casino, you don't get to object based on your own scruples and stay a cop. (This actually happened in Indiana and the cop got fired and stayed fired, even after a lawsuit.) If you become a pharmacist and you object to dispensing certain drugs that get prescribed, you don't get to stay a pharmacist. If you're a whatever who won't do whatever that is part of your job, and your job isn't to set policy, you need to get out of that job.

-and-

Principle Two: If you pay for something, you get to make the rules, even if the rules are stupid and evil. If the people elect a certain government that creates rules that are stupid and evil, then unless those rules conflict with more important rules (like the Constitution), the people deserve to have their rules enforced. The federal government is paying and the people who are making the stupid and evil rules are duly elected (arguably), so they should get to make whatever rules they like, as long as those rules don't violate the law and the Constitution which still trumps all else.


My solution is to avoid things like this and get the federal government out of the healthcare business, which it's no good at and has no legal authority to be in, and give that business to states and private entities, people who are more closely answerable to the people if they go and do stupid things like this.

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Which is the problem with the idea of universal healthcare. It sounds like a good idea, but if we want the government to provide healthcare, then the government has control of healthcare.

Obviously that's not going too well.

[cori-chronicles.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[mycybertuffet.livejournal.com]

In response to Principle Two: They are violating a more important rule - Roe v. Wade. Or at least the spirit/intention thereof.

Also, say the government was entirely left out of hiring practices for health care institutions, and those decisions were left entirely to the owners. There's still nothing to prevent, say, a red-state hospital or pharmacy or entire branch of pharmacies from refusing to dispense birth control ... or provide HIV medication to gay people ... or refuse to treat blacks, or Jews, or uninsured little boys with broken legs who are in danger of developing bone infections (Oh wait - that's already happening http://www.salon.com/mwt/vital_signs/2008/07/16/residents/index.html)

What I'm saying is that I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Government involvement, much like religion, can be a force for both good and evil, as can the free market. It all depends on the people involved. However, unlike the free market, we have some say over who's in control of the government. One person, one vote. As opposed to the free market, in which the more money you have, the more votes you have, and those without are pretty much screwed. Over the past couple of decades, the American middle class has been shrinking, and those at the capitalist system have been getting more and more power. Thanks to the free market, the class system is becoming more entrenched. We've basically got a modern-day aristocracy, made up of those at the top of the corporate heap.

There's always going to be somebody making the rules - I'd prefer to have a say in who the "deciders" are. Because I don't have alot of money, the best I'm going to be able to do in that regard is by voting - and posting petitions on my lj, etc. ;-).

Oh, another article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/beyond-isickoi_b_113955.html

[friendstephen.livejournal.com]

We have some say over who's in control of the government, but not nearly enough. I've spent a total of seven years working for local government, seeing how things work in the halls of government and the halls of power (which are not the same halls). The Republicans I worked for were doing neither the right things, nor the things the people who voted them in wanted them to do. Recently the voters in Indianapolis threw out all the Republicans and replaced them with Democrats. The Democrats did the same thing (neither what they should nor what the voters wanted them to do). In frustration the voters threw out a two-term Democrat mayor who was so well-liked by the people in power that even the rich Republicans supported him (they had cushy contracts with the city). Now a Republican who didn't owe anybody anything got elected, but because he needed staff members he had to hire the Republican insiders who will tend to do what they did the last time they had power in this town: neither what is good nor what is beneficial.

My point is that, unless people actually want to micromanage what the government does to the point that politicians know that people understand and care about what they do day-to-day, the vote is not a sufficient control on a powerful government. And a powerful government is far more dangerous than an aristocratic class out of control. We can overthrow a particular group of aristocrats in short order if we just stop buying their stuff, but the government is a little harder to get rid of, and as I pointed out above, voters can't always effect change.

My desire is that government have no power to deny healthcare to anybody, or any other needed thing to anybody. But I've seen it up close and I promise that if they have the power to give it to you, they will have the power to take it away. If bad people get in (and they always get in somewhere, even if we elect good people at the top), they will at least sometimes use that power in bad ways.

I wasn't surprised to see a broadside against the Ayn Randians at the end of the second article you linked. They are thought to be the standard bearers of libertarian thought, but I'm no fan of them. I don't agree with them that altruism is inherently evil. I think that helping others is wonderful, and essential to having a civilized, livable society. I just don't think that it's possible or desirable to make rules enforcing it, or that government has much of a role in making altruistic goals happen.

And regarding principle two: they are violating neither the letter nor the spirit of Roe vs. Wade. The intention of Roe vs. Wade was that government get out from between the doctor and the woman in abortion decisions. That was it ... nothing else. The Bush administration's proposed rule would take even more restrictions off of the doctor (the traditional rules of employer/employee, and the rules of ethics). I don't think it's a good idea to do that, but there are no Roe vs. Wade implications here.

[friendstephen.livejournal.com]

One more thing. You wrote this:

"As opposed to the free market, in which the more money you have, the more votes you have, and those without are pretty much screwed. Over the past couple of decades, the American middle class has been shrinking, and those at the capitalist system have been getting more and more power. Thanks to the free market, the class system is becoming more entrenched. We've basically got a modern-day aristocracy, made up of those at the top of the corporate heap."

I agree with that 100%; I hate that too. I just don't see socialism, or degrees thereof, as being the solution to that problem. My solutions are taking power away from the government so that the aristocrats can't use the government to manipulate us, making government and corporations more transparent so that money does not equal power to the extent it does today, and better education so that people understand the complex economic and power relationships by which the aristocrats use their money and power to control us.

[mycybertuffet.livejournal.com]

Also, it's worth noting that if the government was paying, those inner city women's clinics wouldn't exist in the first place.

[friendstephen.livejournal.com]

I think you meant "wasn't paying" instead of "was paying".

I agree. Many of those clinics wouldn't exist if the government wasn't paying. But now the government is making bad rules for them, which is easy for the government to do because they are paying. You don't like the rules, fine. I don't like them either. But the government is paying so they should make the rules. If people want inner city womens' clinics that are not hamstrung by bad rules, they should elect people who make good rules. We have just been through a grand national experiment of watching people elect a government twice in the last eight years that both of us agree makes bad rules for inner city womens' clinics.

When do you think people are going to finally stop electing governments that make bad rules?

I don't think they ever will. I think that no matter what it is, if the government runs it there will eventually be a government elected that makes bad rules for it. Maybe not this election or the next, but eventually. If by that time the government is running something that we all have to use (no escape, no running to the competition, we all have to use it -- example: a single payer healthcare system), we are just stuck.

[semiexpat.livejournal.com]

How many Amish cable installers do YOU know???

WIN!!!

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

=D I was particularly proud of that line. ;)

[mycybertuffet.livejournal.com]

Just a small, but important, correction - the morning after pill isn't an abortion pill, it prevents pregnancies from ever occurring. The only reason I'm saying anything is because anti-abortion activists keep trying to classify Plan B as such, and it's important to make people realize that it's not. A year or so ago, there was a female blogger who chronicled her attempt to fill her prescription for Plan B after her husband's condom broke. If I remember correctly, she spent about three days driving to every pharmacy she could (she lived in a rural area), and at each pharmacy her scrip was refused. She eventually got someone to fill it after three days, but by then it was too late - she was pregnant.

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

Damn.

Isn't the morning-after pill the one that keeps an embryo from implanting after it's fertilized tho? I think that's the problem that anti-abortionists have with it.

'Course, that's ALSO one of the ways that oral contraceptives and the birth control patch keeps you from getting pregnant.

But let's forget the fact that your body actually spontaneously "aborts" thousands of potential pregnancies at the exact same stage (flushing the barely fertilized embryo before it attaches to the uterus) in your adult life. Birth control is BAAAAD. =P

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

(I think that somewhere in my angry rant there was the message "The whole damned anti-birth-control-movement is idiotic". ;) )

[mycybertuffet.livejournal.com]

Yes, alas, that is how it works. So I guess for the anti-abortion crowd it's similar to stem cells. I guess if you're a "life begins at conception" type, that's all there is to it. 'Every sperm is sacred' and all that.

Btw, thanks for linking to me :-)

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

*snicker* Now I've got that song in my head.

no problem! It was a message I wanted my friends list to see. ;)

[mycybertuffet.livejournal.com]

And I returned the compliment - check out the comments on my posting :-)

[cori-chronicles.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is so messed up. Just their way of trying to get their own point across in a roundabout way. Which is kinda funny... selling more meds means more money! You'd think that was really their own religion - Making money!