Pennsylvania bill: Allow doctors to deny treatment, medicine on religious grounds

[havocmom]

Forget Kansas, what's the matter with PA?

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Pennsylvania_bill_0217.html

Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1255, also called the Conscientious Objection Act, would absolve medical care providers of liability in cases where reproductive care was denied based on a practitioner's religious or moral beliefs.

Services a provider would be free to withhold, with immunity, include performing an abortion, artificial insemination, and prescribing birth control or emergency contraception (also known as the "morning-after pill").

"There shall be no cause of action against a health care provider for declining to participate in a health care service that violates his or her conscience," the bill reads. "A health care institution that declines to provide or participate in a health care service that violates its conscience," it adds, "shall not be civilly, criminally or administratively liable."

"I intend with this bill," says Senator John Eichelberger (R-Altoona) to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "to make it very clear that people in health care and in medical institutions would be held harmless if they for religious reasons decide not to provide procedures for abortion or contraception."

While I am not wild for either DEM candidates still in the race, this bill in PA certainly makes it clear that having a DEM filling the next SCOTUS vacancies will be more critical than any differences any of us have with the candidates.

Eyes on the prize: keeping women as citizens and not vessels at the mercy of religious crackpots.