Election Day Poll

[Balladeer]

On hospitals, faith is no shield from having to follow best medical practices, period. That is a slippery slope to medical abuse in the name of religion. If your religion blocks you from keeping up with medicine, you are no longer following the Hippocratic Oath—something has come before "do no harm" in your priorities—and have no business being a doctor. Without doctors you can't have a hospital.

 

—Alorael, who sympathizes with the struggle to reconcile faith and profession. But for medicine, you knew what you were getting into. You don't get to put yourself first. You don't get to limit patients with your beliefs. You can't cry foul now.

 

Except the procedures in question are not life threatening. Maybe if there is only one hospital in a community it shouldn't be Catholic, but here if the medical care you want is not available at Sacred Heart, you can go across the street to Marshfield (literally 3 blocks away) and get it done without a problem. If you want to be sterilized or get on the pill or terminate an unwanted pregnancy nothing is going to be harmed by having to travel to the next non-catholic hospital or clinic to do it at.

 

Now if a woman is bleeding out and a choice must be made between saving the mother's life and terminating a pregnancy, THAT I can support as being required of hospitals to do. I'm not sure how time sensitive abortion inducing drugs are to the time of conception but there should at least be provisions that a hospital must only refer the patient to a doctor and facility that can offer what they need/request within the needed time. No harm is done.

 

I find it ridiculous that catholic hospitals are being forced to do vasectomies when those who want a vasectomy can easily find a facility that is not a catholic hospital to do it. As ridiculous as telling a toy store they must carry 'adult' toys. That's how I see it, utterly ridiculous, because the procedures in question are completely optional based on the patient's desire. The only harm being done is forcing faith-based medical personnel to violate their core beliefs and taking away their jobs if they refuse.

[Student of Trinity]

This is maybe a point. Forcing hospitals to do silicone injections would be absurd. Presumably nobody is forcing anyone to do that, but the point is that modern medicine extends to stuff that really has nothing to do with Hippocrates, and it is not always going to be easy to draw the line.

[Alorael at Large]

First, it's worth pointing out that the Hippocratic Oath is not sworn everywhere, and is a couple thousand years out of date. It's the basis for modern medical ethics in many ways, but only piece are still held paramount: First, do no harm. Practice only what you are competent to perform. Practice without regard to reward or wealth. Keep confidentiality. (It's worth noting that the original oath does forbid providing abortions or euthanasia. This is, of course, an area of contestation within medicine.)

 

No, the patient often would not be directly harmed by a doctor's refusal to perform a procedure, accompanied by a referral to someone who would. But here that's besides, the point; it's not about the practicalities of patient, care, it's about the ethics of medical professionals. For elective procedures I agree, to the extent that referral really is a viable option. But pregnancy has serious health consequences, hormonal birth control has uses other than just preventing pregnancy, and barrier contraception prevents infections—infections that have serious health consequences and are hugely widespread. A doctor does not get to stand on moral scruples over the health of a patient, and a system that risks it by referral is one that is already hazardous. What if the transfer to another hospital is not so easy? What if the patient does not have time and does not follow up? What about the cases when there isn't another hospital so conveniently located?

 

Of course, as far as I'm aware only contraceptives are mandated by the new law—and there are good reasons for that. Vasectomies are not required to be on the menu, as they are entirely elective. Abortions are not either. I'm torn about these, but not at all about hormonal and barrier birth control. Especially the latter is so closely linked to personal and public health that any failure to encourage condom use is a violation of medical ethics.

 

 

—Alorael, who finds the toy store analogy terrible, as so many health analogies are. You swear no oaths and receive no trust when you provide toys. No one lives or dies by your decisions. All purchases are entirely elective. The immense differences between healthcare and most commerce are why there are so many laws, guidelines, watchdogs, and regulations surrounding medicine.

[keira]

I just realized something Re: corporations

 

Instead of making them have certain human rights and responsibilities, just change the laws. Is it that hard to append " and corporations" to the who can you sue clause?

[Aran]

As not-a-lawyer, I get the impression that legal systems are very close to immeasurably vast, ancient and undocumented software projects. Written by committees over generations, full of convoluted code nobody understands, in outdated language, largely surpassed by and poorly applicable to modern situations, and full of complicated cross-references and contradictions.

 

(Okay, so kind of like religious texts.)

 

In a metaphor that is probably ludicrously divorced from reality: Letting corporations implement the Sueable interface from scratch might have been too difficult, so they extended the abstract LegalPerson class instead.

[Lilith]

I just realized something Re: corporations

 

Instead of making them have certain human rights and responsibilities, just change the laws. Is it that hard to append " and corporations" to the who can you sue clause?

 

the short answer is that there's no such thing as a "who you can sue clause": it's a mixture of constitutional law and supreme court precedent, and both of those are incredibly hard to change. the long answer is that there are about a million other things that corporations need to be able to do in order to function meaningfully, and they need to be assured that they have the right to do them

 

eliminating corporate personhood and replacing it with a whitelist of specific rights that corporations have would open the door to all manner of abuses. a racist legislature could, for example, effectively ban black people from owning corporations by banning corporations from being owned by black people. since the law technically applies to the corporations and not the people themselves, without corporate personhood this wouldn't be discriminatory as a matter of law. changing this would require changing the entire procedure by which laws are interpreted, which would effectively involve abolishing every law in the United States and rewriting them all from scratch

[Balladeer]

... which would effectively involve abolishing every law in the United States and rewriting them all from scratch

 

...can we have them in plain English this time? For 8th grade reading level, max.

[Harehunter]

... which would effectively involve abolishing every law in the United States and rewriting them all from scratch

 

As impractical as it may sound, I like this idea. There are too many laws on the books now that have been superseded, but not repealed, resulting in a melange of conflicting and contradictory legal mumbo-jumbo. Starting off with a clean slate would eliminate all those outdated and currently meaningless laws, and end up with a concise set of laws that would be more applicable in today's society.

 

I know that the language of the is difficult to read, but I understand that the words that are used have very precise and unambiguous meanings within the letter of the law. To replace this vernacular would mean replacing a single, clearly defined, word or phrase with a sentence or paragraph to convey the same meaning. Perhaps it is not as bad as I think. I think it would be a good idea to have the laws written in such a manner that you don't have to have any specific education to be able to understand it.

[Lilith]

As impractical as it may sound, I like this idea. There are too many laws on the books now that have been superseded, but not repealed, resulting in a melange of conflicting and contradictory legal mumbo-jumbo. Starting off with a clean slate would eliminate all those outdated and currently meaningless laws, and end up with a concise set of laws that would be more applicable in today's society.

 

I know that the language of the is difficult to read, but I understand that the words that are used have very precise and unambiguous meanings within the letter of the law. To replace this vernacular would mean replacing a single, clearly defined, word or phrase with a sentence or paragraph to convey the same meaning. Perhaps it is not as bad as I think. I think it would be a good idea to have the laws written in such a manner that you don't have to have any specific education to be able to understand it.

 

the problem is that new cases will always keep coming up and interpretations will always change over time. in practice you'll have about a decade or two of chaos followed by a decade or two of gradually getting back to where you started. better the devil you know and all that

[Harehunter]

No truer words were said.

[Mistah Q]

delete.