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 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, stammering, and staring with a, "I cannot BELIEVE I just heard ANYONE--let alone someone with whom I share DNA--say that."

[neadods]

thought I was being insensitive for saying that someone should not have a "conscience" way "out" of providing care and doing their JOB

Oh, 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.

If your conscience won't let you answer the damn phone or talk to people who are right in front of you, then you should not be in that job. PERIOD. The "debate" has to be yanked back from people insisting that they just want their rights to pointing out all the other people's rights who are infringed.

Your birthmother isn't the only one with that appalling view either; I've heard it before. It's as if they believe that there is a finite number of terrorists and we can hunt them down, instead of maybe our own policies creating several new generations of terrorists with very personal reasons to strike against us.

Not to mention Spain and England maybe having a few things to say about the "if they're tied up in a war, they can't strike again" mindset.

[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.