Recently, the state of Nuevo Leon, for all intents and purposes Mexico’s Texas and Alabama, passed a new law that allows doctors and nurses to decline treating their patients on religious, ethical or moral grounds. It is called objecion de conciencia and it’s also a law in Mexico City and Yucatan.
State medical staff can refuse service to lots of groups, most alarmingly illegal immigrants, indigenous people, LGBTII, and women.... This as long as their life is not in imminent danger.
The thing I have against these laws is that the Free and Sovereign State of Nuevo Leon is, officially, secular. By extension their services must also be secular.
Surely in some cases, because 8/10 mexicans are catholic, some institutions of government need to work next to religious groups in order to make society function. Say like having increased police presence near churches on Sunday, or allowing religious garments at school.
But these concessions the state makes for the sake of society elevate the rights of religious groups without necessarily diminishing those of minority groups.
So, those concessions are fine. What isn’t fine is for the state, through one of its institutions, to let their employees refuse treating people they don’t like. It is childish and very, very dangerous.
Think of a workplace... No one wants to deal with Janice in accounting, but you have to because it is part of working there; institutions aren’t there to advance individual points of view. No, they’re there to enforce the will of the state, which in this case is to provide healthcare to everyone because under their constitution they suppose equal rights.
So I find it moronic that the state would curtail its own power, and endanger their own citizens to protect a group of their employees on moral grounds. The fact of the matter is that healthcare is not cheap, it’s not like a doctor and a nurse are ready in the break room whenever their colleagues refuse to help patients. There is a very high chance that a transgender patient in need of healthcare might find themselves without a doctor to attend them at a clinic. Which is shameful.
The truth is that, if you have a moral objection to something that might be central to your job... maybe you can’t have that job.... The Amish can’t be airline pilots and devout muslims can’t be Bourbon tasters.
So it is ridiculous to expect the state, a steward of the will of the people, to make very specific, very costly, and dangerous exceptions just to appease you....
Could you say that you’re being discriminated based on your religion if your Dean asks you to perform an examination of a transgender women’s genitals?
I simply don’t think so, neither are your religious rights infringed when asked to perform an abortion... Your services as a state employee are not connected to your identity or beliefs as a person.
Because if doctors was to cure a criminal and, in better health, the criminal escaped we wouldn’t consider the doctor an accomplice. Which is why in an opposite case, where a doctor refused to cure a criminal, and that criminal died, the doctor would lose their license.
I’m not trying to argue religion or morality are a choice... But I just believe that in the case of a state enterprise, religion and morality don’t depend on them, and because of that their employees can’t have the right to refuse to do their job based on those principles.
They surrender their work to the state when they accepted the position. So perhaps when they get worried about their moral and religious rights they should consider “refusing” the post in a government institution to begin with.