The 30-Day Comment Period is Still Open

[neadods]

If you're American, care about women's rights, and have not yet emailed or written, the 30-day comment period on the Department of Health and Human Services Proposed Regulation Ensuring that DHHS Funds Do Not Support Coercive or Discriminatory Policies is still open. (HTML version here.)

I have talked about this before.

There have been many

Comments

[amilyn]

I wasn't going to respond to this post per se, but I don't want the fic post to get less attention. I read every bit of this, have linked to it, and wrote to the DHHS a week or so ago.

This is beyond so amazingly wrong.

[neadods]

I've been holding for later in the comment period so that they realize that there's long-term dissent, not just a knee-jerk and forget. Thank you for the link. I think the Noeson story really needs to get out there as an example of exactly what's going on that can't be ignored as a "what if" that will never happen.

[amilyn]

I plan to call sometime this week. It's horrifying. And I was even more upset to find that my mom (who is a nurse) thought I was being insensitive for saying that someone should not have a "conscience" way "out" of providing care and doing their JOB in a country without a theocracy (and may that remain more the case than it has been lately...). I pointed out that I didn't believe she would ever withhold INFORMATION about possible treatment or a referral to someone who COULD, in good conscience, provide that care or information, even if she objected to something.

Course, that wasn't as horrifying to me as listening to my birthmother last summer tell me that she thinks the war in Iraq is for the purpose of providing a distraction so that no one attacks the U.S. (which I can see as part of the reasoning) and that (here's the part that almost made me leave the room) she thought that was fine and dandy because our children are "more important" than their children and so it was OKAY for their children and people to die. I disagreed,

[neadods]

thought I was being insensitive for saying that someone should not have a "conscience" way "out" of providing care and doing their JOBOh, Leavitt and his religious masters have done a brilliant job of framing. It's all about hurting the widdle feelings of the caregivers... and never about the care they're not giving, the rights of their own patients, or even (as the Noeson story points out) the rights of their employees and coworkers

[rabidsamfan]

*sigh* Ask your mom how she'd feel about having a co-worker who couldn't get fired, and was being paid the same wages as she is, but refused to do some or most of the work because of "conscience"? Ask her who'd have to take up the slack, and whose tax money (because this is about federal funds) would be paying the goof-off. I bet that would change her tune.