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Ozy Frantz is a student at a well-respected Hippie College in the United States. Zie bases most of zir life decisions on Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and identifies more closely with Pinkie Pie than is probably necessary. Ozy can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter as @ozyfrantz. Writing is presently Ozy's primary means of support, so to tip the blogger, click here.
Jesus, can you define what you mean by the word “compelled”?
Do you mean “compelled” as in “perform this abortion or this abortion clinic will be laying you off”?
Or “compelled” as in “perform this abortion or the police will arrest you”?
Or something else?
@dungone – “Does it need to be said? Yes. I worked for a hospital that offered abortion services and all doctors who were allowed to give reproductive advice to women were also required to give abortion information. I don’t see how anyone’s ethics would come in to this.” With respect, there is a world of difference between giving information on abortions and performing the procedure. “Here’s a slightly different angle. If you follow the news about abortion, there was a Catholic hospital in which emergency room doctors realized they needed to perform an immediate abortion to save a woman’s life.… Read more »
@Dr. Anonymous, is there a shortage of feminists going to med school? That doesn’t really seem like a fair argument to make for a host of different reasons. I’m almost sure that there’s at least one doctor at every hospital in the country who would be willing to perform them if the facilities they worked for would allow it. And if they didn’t face imminent threats of death in some parts of the country.
@Hugh Tipping
My mother is an MD, granted not an OB/GYN but she has been under contract to perform abortions. And she has influenced my position on this question a lot. I still believe in pro-choice, however I agree with my mother on the opinion that these angry 20-something feminists protesting for abortions should focus their power on going to med school, learning to become OB/GYN and starting to provide abortions themselves instead of only demanding someone else provide them with abortions.
Everyone, let’s get the obvious shit out of the way. You’re not going to walk into a gynecologist’s office and demand brain surgery are you? No, of course not. But if you walk in and ask for information about an abortion, the gynecologist sure as shit better give you sound medical advice. Not ethical advice, but medical advice which their profession is supposed to deal with. So let me put on my Captain Obvious hat and qualify my position so that it’s really really clear: my position is that if you work somewhere that provides abortions, and you are generally… Read more »
And you shall name your band:
Alduin and Fus Roh Das
What Barry said. I meant mostly in planned parenthood and the likes clinic. If you work there as a doctor, chances are you are just asking to have it asked of you.
Sort of like being asked to serve alcohol in a bar. If your religion is against alcohol consumption so that you wouldn’t even want to see others consume it then don’t work in a bar or restaurant that serves alcohol.
I can think think of only two instances in which doctors should be made to perform abortions, or lose their jobs: 1) A doctor working in a planned parenthood or some other clinic which is expressly there to provide abortion services, among other services. 2) An emergency room doctor should be willing to perform an emergency abortion if the mother’s health or life is under immediate threat. A doctor who is unwilling to perform an abortion shouldn’t take a job at an abortion clinic or in an ER, just as someone whose religion forbids selling comic books shouldn’t take a… Read more »
@dungone/Schala: So, a doctor should be compelled to perform a medical procedure against their will? Doesn’t that violate the doctor’s autonomy? Does that mean that all doctors should be compelled to perform any medical procedure requested by a patient, full stop? If not, what makes abortion special? On a vaguely related note, I’ve always expected someone to become a pharmacist, go to one of those states that allows a pharmacist to refuse to supply meds for religious or moral reasons (mostly as a way to make it more difficult to get emergency contraceptives), get a job in a pharmacy, then… Read more »
That doctor better not be an OB/GYN. They can refuse because they’re generalists, maybe, but not on grounds of “but I don’t wanna”.
@dungone – first of all, having a moral stance against abortion =/= a moral stance against medicine. Furthermore, a doctor cannot “do anything he wants” with impunity because he doesn’t have consent of the patient. The issue here is not runaway doctors performing illegal procedures on unsuspecting patients, the issue is whether a doctor should be compelled, against their will, to perform a procedure they do not agree with. Basically, compelling a doctor to perform an abortion against their will removes choice the same way compelling a woman to have a baby does.
Ideally, I would imagine that a person should not ever be compelled to perform an abortion if it is not in keeping with their own moral stance Totally, completely, entirely, 100% disagree with you there. Someone who has a moral stance against medicine should not be a doctor. That’s where your personal morality stops and the code of ethics that has been adopted by the profession takes over. So you can’t argue that an individual doctor has the right to judge for himself what constitutes doing “harm” and what doesn’t. This is something that has to be objectively decided upon.… Read more »
Dr. A – Ideally, I would imagine that a person should not ever be compelled to perform an abortion if it is not in keeping with their own moral stance. Just as a woman has the right , under the concept of bodily autonomy, to have an abortion, a doctor has the right under the same concept to not perform one if they so choose. One may argue that the taking of the hippocratic oath would obligate a doctor to perform an abortion yet by that very same oath, to some doctors an abortion would entail “doing harm” to an… Read more »
Dr Anon, you do realise that most people aren’t actually capable of effecting abortions regardless of their views, right? I mean most pro-choice activists, like most people, are not medical doctors, let alone ob-gyn specialists.
Ozy
That partly answers the question, but still. Does pro-choice mean that someone else has to effect the actual abortion?
@ Tom: I’ve often used that Belgian abortion incident as an argument in favour of constitutional monarchy. In my opinion it was a great, graceful way to respect both the sovereignty of parliament and the personal views of the King*
*Not that I’m implying these should be given equal weight, but it is nice to allow them both to be assuaged
Dr. Anonymous: I’ve definitely seen some discussion in feminist spaces; there are, iirc, scholarships, and part of the reason Dr. Tiller’s death was so mourned is that he’s one of the few people who had the strength to do late-term abortions. (Both to deal with the protesters and with the pregnant people, most of whom were mourning wanted children.)
Dorkboy: I use “she” to refer to myself before I swapped pronouns, but I’m genderqueer, so I may be more comfortable with weird genderfuckery than a lot of binary trans people.
I have always wondered about these pro-choisers. Does the right to abortion also entail somebody else’s obligation to provide abortion?
I wonder this especially when I see feminist organizations arranging all kinds of pro-choice support events, but no one ever seems to discuss who should actually perform the abortions.
Have anyone visited these pro-choice events and seen if there is any kind of discussion about going to med school and becoming a provider of abortions?
@Jimmy Wow. Will I ever understand black metal? 😛 @barry warkentin Deutsch If you’re interested in an anecdote about abortion in Belgium, we are a monarchy with a parliament and a government, where the king only has a ceremonial function, and has to sign some laws that are passed in the parliament, among others. Our previous king, Boudewijn, was staunchly catholic, so when abortion was legalised, he refused to sign the bill. The parliament then did the most awesome thing: declared the king unfit to rule just long enough for the prime minister to sign the bill instead. I don’t… Read more »
Ouch! I’m sorry to hear that.
Jimmy, that was so many kinds of awesome.
“Am I the only one who, at the above point in the sentence, was for a moment under the misimpression that Jimmy’s mother was a member of Jimmy’s black metal band? (Which I was prepared to find utterly charming.)” I’m sure there was a better way of writing that sentence but it completely eluded me at the time. My mother is a pretty closeminded, hateful person, all told. So while she actually has the perfect personality for black metal, she would not be able to do it on account of the fact that she is terminally Christian with all the… Read more »
Schala, in your case it’s pretty clear that only female pronouns are appropriate, but from what I understand you transitioned relatively young and have never been in the public eye. Califia has been a prolific writer for decades, and his early work talks a lot about being a feminist lesbian and a member of the dyke community. It doesn’t make sense without acknowledging that the writing is coming from a female perspective. It’s a weird and awkward sort of thing. I hope that in the future everyone who needs to transition will be able to do so before having to… Read more »
Can’t say for Pat Califia, but I didn’t “identify as male” before I transitioned. I was seen as one, maybe, but identified as one? Never.
To expand on my previous post, I’m not advocating using the wrong pronouns to discuss ordinary events in a trans person’s life (such as where they grew up, went to school, liked to eat for breakfast, etc.), as that’s both unnecessary and disrespectful. But in the case of Califia’s essay, he was writing from the perspective of a woman. Therefore, for the essay to make any sense it requires some degree of referring to his gender history. Otherwise you’ll have an audience reacting with anything from puzzlement to fury that a man is writing about what it means to be… Read more »