I haven’t been able to find a diary already posted on this, so here's the AssociatedPress link from June 21, SC medical ethics law prompts concerns re: LGBTQ healthcare. reporting that on June 17, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law the "Medical Ethics and Diversity Act" giving protection to medical practitioners, health care institutions and health care payers in South Carolina for refusal to provide (or refer for) any procedure that violates their conscience on moral, ethical or religious grounds, theoretically excepting emergency procedures for life-saving services per federal regulation.
To my reading, this kind of law threatens everyone who’s not narrow mainstream in perceivable appearance, outlook, or life.
The article reports that among other states concerned to protect the conscience of healthcare providers and payers, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a similar proposal into law in March 2021, and in early 2022, Nebraska legislature considered a similar bill.
Proponents argue that such laws do not discriminate against individual patients or patient groups, but merely allow opting-out of types of care objected to for ‘all’ patients, e.g., commonly: “abortion, certain types of contraception, genetic experimentation, death penalty executions and the sterilization of minors.” But since institutions and payers are ‘protected’ alongside individual doctors, nurses, medical students and other providers, such claims clearly are massively specious.
In April, when SC’s house passed the bill, Sarah Warbelow, legal director of
the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, issued a statement opposing the measure: “It is disturbing that some politicians in South Carolina are prioritizing individual providers’ beliefs ahead of patient health and wellbeing. This legislation is dangerously silent in regards to the needs of patients and fails to consider the impact that expanding refusals can have on their health,”
In May, fifty SC healthcare professionals sent a letter to Gov. McMaster urging he veto the bill, warning that it would increase dangerous barriers to care for critical needs disproportionate in the LGBTQ community.
Ivy Hill, community health program director with the SC United for Justice and Equality coalition, concerned about healthcare access to the Campaign for Southern Equality’s “Trans in the South” guide, underlined the discriminatory mechanism of such laws, adding “We already face so many additional barriers in accessing healthcare and this just adds another one.”
State senators debated whether or not the measure would improve efforts to expand healthcare services across the state. Speaking against the proposal, Democrat state Sen. Vernon Stephens suggested that rural patients who lack easy access to healthcare facilities might struggle to find alternatives should a doctor deny their procedure.
[Republican state Sen. Larry] Grooms said the bill would help the state retain physicians — particularly older ones — who fear discipline for not performing procedures to which they object.
Laws that facilitate elevating subjective practitioner preferences and institutional considerations (e.g., financial) above objective, established, professional, medical ethics codes, oaths, and practices cannot avoid <big>threatening everyone who’s not narrow mainstream.</big>
And not patients and their families alone. Physicians who have to answer to administrators, NPs and PAs and nurses and medical students who have to answer to physicians AND to administrators, and on down the line — the law’s pretext in practice subjects actual conscience to more undue pressure rather than less.
The technical exception regarding “emergency procedures where such life-saving services must be provided per federal regulation” is almost irrelevant, since emergency departments exist within larger healthcare structures empowered by this kind of law to handicap their own facilities on prejudicial basis.
Where it’s slightly relevant, the result will be generation of even more overloading of emergency facilities than ever, with inevitable continued deterioration of quality of care as healthworkers are ground even more into dust under this additional strain on already overextended systems.
In short, for anyone who MUST place trust in the professional impartiality of the healthcare structure they’ve got (assuming they’ve even got any), South Carolina has placed them on notice that — they can’t.
Even patients whose life depends upon placing that trust have to watch everything they say around healthcare personnel, and everything they communicate in other ways —e.g., clothing, material indications of religion or heritage, social or educational level, anything— for fear of being refused needed care based upon the ‘conscientious objection’ of practitioners or of the authorities under whom practitioners work. All that would be needed, apparently, is to classify that need or that care as falling within an objected category.
The worse for all whom current U.S. law does not extend full legal bodily autonomy — notably women and undocumented residents.
The total of all segments of population under threat in South Carolina now have even more common ground for political alliance than they did before.
Given the number and range of discriminatory state laws passed in recent years, and the way the Dobbs ruling operates to validate open discrimination, such laws seem likely only to proliferate across the nation.
Whether this will unify more of the population to vote blue in November, though, we can only guess, since history shows that any force causing scarcity of survival resources just as often —or more— tends to generate further divisiveness and conflict.
It depends upon whether opinion leaders and official leaders extend hands to one another on behalf of their constituents and followers, or prioritize their own alone.