Legislators must swear not to fight a duel. What if they instead pledged to ‘do no harm’?
I’ll be honest: When I first read Senate Bill 90, the brainchild of Rep. Steve Meredith, R-Leitchfield, it seemed so absurd that I was sure the brighter minds in the Republican caucus would let it languish.
But no. Apparently, those brighter minds think it won’t be any problem to pass a vague and sweeping law to allow any medical provider anywhere to deny service to patients if it somehow goes against their conscience or religious belief. So the Senate Health and Welfare Committee hastened the bill’s journey to a court challenge by sending it out of committee last week.
(Meredith has already pulled one bill, Senate Bill 89, which would have allowed police to stop people for looking suspicious, then detain them for up to two hours without any record of them being there. The kindest thing to say about Meredith is that he doesn’t think things through.)
Something else I underestimated at the start of this session: The largely Republican tendency to target vulnerable populations. SB 90 is part of a ‘Slate of Hate’ aimed at hurting LGBTQ populations and women, which also includes bills to micromanage where kids go to the bathroom and which sports teams they play on. Worst of all, of course, is House Bill 321, which would flat out deny medical treatment to transgender kids. The idea that the Senate would push out Senate Bill 90, but sit on their Republican colleague’s bill to ban conversion therapy, a harmful pseudoscience that tries to “cure” LGBTQ kids of a problem they don’t have, is an outright disgrace but less and less of a surprise.
And as several people pointed out in the committee hearing, Senate Bill 90 is probably illegal, and it, once again, fixes a problem that doesn’t exist. There is not a doctor in this entire country that performs abortions against their will. There is not a doctor or nurse who gets into medical care for transgender people for any other reason than they want to.
But supporters also seem oblivious to the potential consequences: If one pharmacist can deny filling a birth control prescription because it goes against their “conscience,” then another could stop a Viagra prescription because they’re worried about overpopulation. Could a doctor refuse to treat someone because they disagree with their politics?
Dr. Steve Kraman wrote an opinion column for the Herald-Leader pointing out that he is a Jew of European descent whose family members died in the Holocaust, yet he recently treated a patient who sported a swastika tattoo.
“Despite my personal feelings about this hateful symbol, as a physician, it is my ethical and legal duty to put the well-being of the patient ahead of my own, make a diagnosis and offer treatment,” he wrote. “That’s what doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers do.”
Legislators have an ethical and legal duty to find the biggest problems that face our state and try to fix them. Some of them are trying; others, like Sen. Meredith, just chase the same old phantoms: immigrants and vulnerable children and which bathrooms people use. Legislators have to take an oath to uphold state and federal Constitutions and refrain from fighting duels. Instead it should be more like the Hippocratic Oath sworn by doctors — to “first do no harm.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2020 at 8:15 AM.
