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Saturday, October 26th, 2019

Religious Corporations Are Interfering in Doctor-Patient Relationships

Author:     Amy Littlefield
Source:     truthout
Publication Date:     October 24, 2019
 Link: Religious Corporations Are Interfering in Doctor-Patient Relationships
Stephan:   The Founders did everything they could to create a firewall between church and state. Several states, such as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were founded on this premise. Many of the Founders personally, or in their immediate family history, had experience with what happens when that firewall is breached. However, with the unholy marriage of rightwing fascist politics and fundamentalist religiosity that took root in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century with the rise of radio preachers that firewall was breached producing christofascism.  Nowhere is this clearer than in the American illness profit system. Here is the latest.

Credit: CNS /Theresa Laurence, Tennessee Register

A faith-based health system’s firing of a doctor who challenged its ban on aid-in-dying could become the latest front in the effort by religious corporations to expand their rights.

Dr. Barbara Morris worked for Centura Health in Colorado, a Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist health system that banned her, on religious grounds, from helping a patient with terminal cancer who was requesting access to lethal medication. In Colorado, where such prescriptions are legal, more than a third of acute-care hospital beds operate under Catholic rules that ban abortion, most forms of contraception, sterilization, in vitro fertilization and aid-in-dying. Nationwide, Catholic hospitals have denied gender-affirming care to transgender patients, pressured people to bury their miscarried fetuses and turned away or delayed care to patients who are miscarrying. The Seventh-day Adventist Church also opposes abortion and aid-in-dying.

Colorado’s aid-in-dying law, passed by voters in 2016, allows religious facilities to ban doctors from prescribing lethal medication when the patient intends to use it “on the facility’s premises.” Morris’s patient, Neil Mahoney, planned to take the […]

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