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Thursday, June 19, 2008

Courts - Calif. Justices Weigh Whether Doctors, Citing Religion, Can Refuse to Treat Some Patients

Ashley Surdin of the Washington Post reports today in a lengthy story that begins:

LOS ANGELES -- On the heels of its ruling on same-sex marriage, California's highest court will decide another potentially landmark civil rights case: whether doctors can refuse to treat certain patients for religious reasons.

The case reaches back nearly 10 years, to when Guadalupe "Lupita" Benítez of Oceanside was trying to conceive. Benítez, who is gay, says doctors violated her civil rights because they refused her a fertility treatment, saying it was against their religion to perform insemination on a lesbian.

The two doctors and their employer, North Coast Women's Care Medical Group, say they denied Benítez treatment because it is against their Christian beliefs to perform insemination on unwed women, whether heterosexual or lesbian. Their refusal, they argue, is protected by their constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Unlike instances in which doctors refuse to perform abortions, this case is unusual in that doctors are seemingly denying services to a select group of patients, said Joan Hollinger, a professor of family law at the University of California at Berkeley. And it is unclear whether the Constitution's religious freedom clause protects such selectiveness.

From later in the story:
Jennifer C. Pizer, a lawyer with the gay rights group Lambda Legal who is representing Benítez, said that while the law protects doctors who refuse certain treatments on religious grounds, it does not allow them to do so on a discriminatory or selective basis. In other words, when doctors refuse a treatment, their refusal must apply to all patients -- not to a group, such as unmarried women or lesbians.

"All you have to do is imagine, for a moment, a doctor agreeing to an abortion for women of color but saying, 'I will not' for white women. Or a Jewish doctor saying, 'I will do an abortion for Muslim women, but not Jewish women.' Or vice versa," Pizer said. "Just imagining those possibilities shows how deeply problematic such a notion would be."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 19, 2008 08:37 AM
Posted to Courts in general