Essential Issues: W's Birth-Control-Is-Abortion Directive

In recent article from Colorado, Bill Grant presents a pragmatist but secular take on Colorado Proposition 48 and on Bush's directive prohibiting "discrimination" by hospitals against doctors - physicians, surgeons, dentists, psychologists etc - who base their treatment decisons on their religious beliefs instead of scientific evidence and the best interest of the patient, avoid effective medications that may interfere with the implantation of a fertilized zygote and so on. Unfortunately, Grant assumes that the relationship between a doctor and a patient is inherently unfree, and the debate is about who is entitled to coerce whom:

.... religious radicals in the Bush administration have devised yet another way to undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom. Although doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of conscience are already protected from discriminatory hiring practices, the administration proposes redefining abortion to include most forms of birth control and any procedure resulting in the termination of a fetus “between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.” Medical personnel who object to these procedures would be under no obligation to explain them to a patient, or refer her to a practitioner who would offer counsel .... This rule completely subordinates the rights of the patient to receive the most appropriate medical treatment to the personal beliefs of the medical staff.

The focus instead ought to be on the essential moral issues:

The doctor (at least here in California) works _in_ a hospital, but _for_ a patient - the doctor bills the patient, not the hospital, for services performed etc. But under the Bush regulation, the patient has no way to know which doctors (witch doctors?) will be making their treatment decisions on the basis of supernatural beliefs that have nothing to do with scientific medicine. The Bush regulations would have the effect of removing the moral requirement for the patient's informed consent - in a context in which no rational patient would give her consent (to pay for treatment decisions made on the basis of supernatural beliefs instead of science).

The other issue is that the regulation prohibits hospital organizations from limiting privileges - as any rational hospital board would insist - to professionals who will base their treatment decisions exclusively on science and a rational consideration of the best interest of the patient, and not on their supernatural religions. Even if I know and trust the owners and managers of a hospital, I cannot trust their institution - because Bush's criminal gang, pretending to be a legitimate government, will use force to prevent them from running their hospital according to the rational, principled judgement of their minds.

But of course it would take someone with an Enlightenment-based understanding of science, medicine, and individual rights to make these points. Trust a Pragmatist such as Grant to miss the essential moral issues entirely.