Maya Devi, 28, made it in time to a hospital to deliver her baby at the Kanpur Medical College in Northern Uttar Pradesh state. The doctors, however, had other ideas. Devi is an “untouchable” and therefore the upper caste doctors refused to touch her and let both her and her baby die.
Devi made it into the Intensive Care Unit because of a heart attack but the doctors, including the chief superintendent, refused to help her because of her caste.
Dr. Kiran Pandey, head of gynecology at the hospital, rushed to the hospital but it was too late due to two cardiac arrests. Her boy died a little later — a second victim of India’s caste system.
So much for the theory that education tends to diminish the reliance on irrational religious and cultural beliefs.
For the full story, click here
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Many interesting comments made, with the usual one exception. It is appalling to me that health care practitioners can/are refusing service to patients based on their own personal religious standards. While I can make a case for Doctor’s/Nurses refusing to participate in non-life threatening abortions, a position I don’t personally agree with, it would be only when the mother’s life/health is not at stake. Pharmacist’s, however, should not have the right to choose which prescribed treatment they dispense, since to me their role is passive rather than active in health care provision.
While we can certainly engage in an intellectual discussion of the needs of law vs. the needs of conscience, the article that precedes this discussion raises visceral feelings of horror in me. All cultures it seems have traditional areas of belief/prejudice that I feel are contrary to acceptable human behavior. While the law is meant to be used as a “civilizing factor” to restrain human barbarity, we all sense that it is barely up to the task in most cultures, ours included. This was a human being, a mother to be, left to die due to a societal anomaly. She was left to die by seeming professionals, whose prejudice trumped both their intellectual and empathic sensibilities.
Susan and Patty C.
I really like your ideas. I’d like to start a radio program called: Resistor. It would be people presenting ideas like yours on how to confront unjust authority (a little encountered issue as you know:) Resistance: make it legal, make it effective!
Best to you both,
Jill
Susan and Patty C., you have style!!!
Jill
Patty C wrote:
Outrageous! If the store manager was unwilling to resolve this customer complaint with the employee, during the week, I would have called the State Board of Licensing to register a formal complaint, and/or, if I still didn’t have my scrip in my hand, I would have called the police.
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Outrageous is right, and given that the customer’s name is on a prescription slip to be filled, that customer could easily call the police to have this person charged with theft of personal property. That would have resulted in some very bad publicity for the store, and probably led to him losing his job. At least, I would hope so, but I’ll have to defer to those who are law students, lawyers and law professors on the legal questions. 🙂
Personally, I don’t care what a person’s religious beliefs about contraception are; he/she has no legal right to force ME to accept them. Refusing to give back a customer’s Rx slip crosses the line between “free exercise of religion” and force of it.
TGIF – and thanks for the ‘think’ links, binx.
Hopefully, mespo got in at trial today so the week wasn’t a total wash for him and he is either happily held up somewhere having some chops and scotch OR en route back East. And to make it easier for him to follow, and for a few others, I included this original link.
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/04/23/ninth-circuit-rules-that-borders-agents-can-search-computers-without-either-probable-cause-or-reasonable-suspicion/#comment-11853
Just a note about the blog spam programs – Patty was astute as usual. The inclusion of multiple links will kick off the spam program and likely hold up the posting until it is released from moderation. One link at a time is a good rule. 🙂
‘Mespo, I agree, and in at least one case a few years ago, there was one pharmacist who refused to give the customer’s Rx slip back to her for filling elsewhere.’
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Outrageous! If the store manager was unwilling to resolve this customer complaint with the employee, during the week, I would have called the State Board of Licensing to register a formal complaint, and/or, if I still didn’t have my scrip in my hand, I would have called the police.
Susan,
Refusal to fill birth control prescriptions has happened in many places and that is wrong. What interests me is the medical “conscience” often revolves around the control of women’s bodies. Likewise “conscience” doesn’t seem to work on a class basis as often as it should. Although I admire the many health care practioners who do offer their services at reduced cost or even for free the AMA as a whole has, until fairly recently, stauchly opposed universal access to health care.
Too often “conscience” seems to be based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation or other religious/social prejudice prevelant in a particular society. These unquestioned prejudices are substituted for genuinely examined ethics.
Jil
Mespo727272 wrote:
I certainly understand the physician not wanting to participate in a therapy he may personally consider immoral. However, he/she has no right to frustrate the patient in the exercise of their rights by refusing a referral.
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Mespo, I agree, and in at least one case a few years ago, there was one pharmacist who refused to give the customer’s Rx slip back to her for filling elsewhere. It’s one thing to exercise your own conscience to opt out of an action you feel you cannot do. It is quite another to FORCE that conscience onto another person by refusing to give back a prescription for contraceptives to a customer.
JT:
I certainly understand the physician not wanting to participate in a therapy he may personally consider immoral. However, he/she has no right to frustrate the patient in the exercise of their rights by refusing a referral. Physicians and lawyers are not judges of actions or intentions, nor should they be. They are granted certain privileges by the state to serve the public, and not to judge the public.
As a young lawyer, I was once asked to defend a man accused of child molestation. I took the case and interviewed the client. Following that meeting, I came away convinced of his innocence. However, after interviewing the victim and the officer I came to quite the opposite conclusion. I found that I could not effectively represent the man due to my revulsion of the crime, and, after advising my client of the dilemma, asked the Court to permit me to withdraw for personal reasons unrelated to the case. When the Judge objected, I told him I had an ethical obligation to withdraw but did not reveal my reasons. The case was assigned to another attorney who won an acquittal of the case.
My decision was correct as either I misread the evidence due to my prejudice against the crime, and would not have adequately represented a legally innocent man, or I properly read the evidence but would have been conflicted in devoting my full energies to representing someone I felt was guilty of such a heinous act. I think the physician confronted with the patient seeking an abortion is in my shoes, and should step aside to let others who are less emotionally involved or less ethically conflicted resolve the issue.
There you go again nibbles … you almost make a point but you opt for the cheap shot … then you pick up your toys and run home … slamming the door behind you. Thanks for pointing out Obama is politician. But you derailed yourself when you opted to spread false rumors that you heard on the Right Wing talk machine.
I realize that you’re comparing him to John McCain, a man that has been constant in his message, constant in his support of George Bush, constant in his defense liberty and freedom and the abhorrent practice of torture – and hasn’t wavered on points or yielded to petty politics. The fact that his economic adviser – Phil Gramm is the architect of the current mortgage crisis and co-chair of McCain’s campaign – and John McCain himself is one of the famed Keating 5, the previous high-mark in banking scandals.
Please point out what material was changed on the Obama Web presence. That’s the Sean Hannity talking point of the month – but not true. Equally not true when just the 2 days ago he (Hannity) lied yet again on the air with mis-information about the economy – simply making up statistics or pulling them from his posterior private areas.
Now you are certainly entitled to feel anyway you care to, but conflating what you would like to be true with what is true is something else and you try to pawn it off as truth. Although, our beautiful America provides that option.
JR. the only time obama spoke out against the war was when he was running for state senate in a safe district surrounded by anti-war zealots. it was convenient and politically necessary for him to say what he said them. Since that time he has gone from one extreme to the other; at times agreeing with Iraq operations and other times not; all depending on the direction of the political winds in America. Most recently he first purged his website of his anti-war blather from that moment when he was running in his safe antiwar district in Chicago to adding it back when he decided to run for President.
Obama is a politician despite his telling us he is not. Heck, even his PASTOR of twenty years says he is a politician. Just check out his Bill Moyers interview.
Case closed. Obama will lose 49 states in November.
JR:
It is an interesting debate. For example, doctors are insisting that they will not treat or refer on matters of abortion. Yet, if they have the right not to have to participate in such personally offensive practice, can they refuse to serve people who they consider immoral or living an immoral lifestyle. We end up on a slippery slope.
Mespo & JT-
This sort of behavior is what makes me cringe when people argue that doctors and pharmacists should be able to shirk their responsibilities when their religious beliefs conflict with their job requirements. These doctors seem to value their religious taboos more than the lives of about 160 million of their countrymen; in this instance, it amounts to nothing less than religious discrimination practiced against the infirm. What kind of a democracy can countenance that?
Um, Nibbles? Our extreme right wing Yale undergrad, Harvard MBA president thought the way to confront Wahabist terrorists based in Afghanistan and Pakistan was to pull troops from Kabul and march them to Baghdad to overthrow a secular government in a Shi’ite country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Say what you want about Obama, but his brand of irrational behavior never got 4,050 US troops and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed.
That’s why philosophies that divide cultures instead of uniting them are so insidious. Niblet has a point here –he just overstates it (“never tends”); uses a bad example (“Obama”); and he needs a period after the word “behavior.”. For Niblet, that’s pretty good. Education without compassion for others is purposeless; irrational hatred of others because of the circumstances of their birth is an act of ignorance; permitting an innocent to die out of indifference, and in contravention of your oath, is an act of pure evil.
I have also noticed that education never tends to diminish irrational behavior on the left.
Case example: Barack Obama.