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Religion versus the right to health care

By Jocelynne Scutt - posted Tuesday, 21 February 2012


Comments on rape and abortion made by U.S. Republican Presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum, in his race for GOP nomination, raise questions as leadership on the health, security and safety of women.

The world is accustomed to past and present reality: that as a general rule, men hold pre-eminence in the political race for leadership and that, where elections are mandated and held, the vast majority of countries elect male leaders. Generally, there is no choice, for rarely do political parties preselect women for the top job. Yet when it comes to political leadership, women have a right to representation that incorporates them as an equally significant part of humanity. Women have a right to leaders having an awareness, appreciation and understanding of woman-as-equal.

Human rights must include women as equal members of the human race, and true democracy demands leaders who know and practice this principle. In addition to all else, leaders must have the capacity to initiate and support measures: advancing women’s equality in health rights; extending to women the right to feel and be safe and secure at home and outside it; and ensuring women the right to be autonomous in their daily lives, in both public and private.

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This means that women’s health, safety, security and wellbeing should not be jeopardised by culture, ideology or religious dogma denying women access to health care.

Yet interviewed by Piers Morgan, Santorum’s remarks make clear his difficulty in reconciling three elements: the notion that rape is a crime he cannot be seen to support, his proposition that no pregnancy should end in termination, and the appeal to faith, namely, that ‘God’ has a place in there, somewhere.

This is evident in his stumbling replies to Morgan’s questions as to his stand that women should be denied abortion ever and always, including where conception follows from sexual attack. Even were his own daughter pregnant through rape, he would admonish her to bear the child. Even if she were ‘begging him to allow her’ to terminate the pregnancy, he ‘would do what every father would do; to try to counsel your daughter to do the right thing.’ For him, ‘the right thing’ is absolute. It is to continue the pregnancy, bring the child to term, and accept motherhood as the ‘right’ outcome.

These duties fall exclusively on women. ‘Women ought, in such a circumstance,’ he said,  ‘welcome’ this ‘horrible’ ‘gift from God’, for women are bound to ‘make the best out of a bad situation’, albeit such a child is ‘horribly created’:“As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life we have horrible things happen. I can't think of anything more horrible, but nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation and I would make the argument that that is making the best.”

Asked about the impact of rape and its potential aftermath, Santorum asserted: “Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn't have this baby, if she kills her child, then that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice, I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or she doesn't, it will always be her child, and she will always know that…And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I've always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created - in the sense of rape - but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.”

Apparently for Santorum, women who have had denied to them their own bodily integrity and autonomy through rape will be denied it through the refusal of a right to abortion.

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On abortion, Santorum is not alone. Fellow U.S. presidential primaries candidate Newt Gingrich supports a ‘personhood’ amendment to the US Constitution that would define a ‘person’ as ‘every human being from the moment of fertilisation, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof’. U.S. writer Tanya Somanader critiques the ‘profoundly ambiguous language’ of such an amendment, rejected in Mississippi when it came before the state legislature in 2011. ‘Fertilisation’ is, she says, defined so that it could ‘potentially outlaw birth control, stem cell research, and in vitro fertilisation’.

Ironically, claims for the ‘personhood’ of the fertilised ovum and foetus bring women’s personhood into question. Whether or not intended, such proposals put into potential conflict the pregnant woman and the foetus, as if the woman and the pregnancy are two separate entities rather than the pregnancy being an intrinsic part of the woman or, indeed, intrinsic to the pregnant woman.

For some time, concerns about the promotion of such a contest have been raised in the context of healthcare. While the pregnant woman is entitled to consider herself the obstetrician’s patient, the proposition is that obstetricians may see the pregnancy, that is, the fertilised ovum and foetus, as their patient. This is crucial, for should it come to a question of medical treatment, including survival, the doctor’s duty lies with ‘the patient’.

Does the duty lie in respect of the woman, or does it lie with ‘the tiniest patient’, the developing foetus? If the focus is on the foetus-as-patient, the rights of the (pregnant) woman may take second place. If both are persons, with the survival of one seen as in competition with the survival of the other, whose personhood prevails? Indeed, legal cases have been fought on precisely this issue: when survival comes into question, who has the right: the woman or the putative child?

This particular contest as to personhood and who has it lies only with the women. Men’s personhood is never challenged in this way. While women are targeted by restrictive laws based in biology and physiology, men are not denied rights to medical treatment and health care when it comes to ‘only male’ conditions. Although financial constraints may stand as a barrier for some or even many, ideological arguments do not.

Where reproduction, and most particularly women’s reproductive capacity, is in issue, religion is invoked in the healthcare arena more broadly. At Fordham University, a woman student, Brigette Dunlap, was denied contraceptive care, despite provision under New York law for the inclusion of birth control pills in the college’s health care plan. This is not an isolated case.

Despite polls showing majority support for coverage of birth control under health insurance plans, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops contends that including contraception in students or employees’ health care cover violates religious freedom. Thus, ‘religious freedom’ appears to include the right to impose on others one’s own religious beliefs and, more, to deny health care by reason not of health and medical care standards, but of religion. This may be seen as running directly counter to standards of health care and medical treatment a patient may expect; namely, that a person should receive professional care based on health and medical knowledge and requirements, not on the basis of ‘faith’.  

The promotion of the fertilised ovum and the foetus as ‘persons’ raises the spectre that the woman is no more than a receptacle for that fertilised ovum or foetus. The contention that religious belief renders contraception untenable promotes the ‘right’ of the ovum to be fertilised, or to have its chance without impediment, over the woman’s right to make autonomous decisions about her life. Thus at every stage of her reproductive cycle the woman’s right to personhood is, it seems, to be subjugated to ‘rights’ of reproductive material which is part of her own body.

The invocation that this is as it should be, because religion says it should be so, is difficult to sustain. The denial of contraceptive care, including abortion rights, has no clear origin in religion: over time, and in different eras, differing positions have been taken on the subject by the Christian and other religions (and by the law).

For Santorum, Gingrich and their cohort the call to religion taking pre-eminence over or directing the parameters of healthcare may be centred in the Vatican II declaration that abortion and infanticide are ‘abominable crimes’ and ‘life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception’. Notably, pre-conception was not referred to, and varying positions taken by the Roman Catholic Church over time remain unchallenged in the historical record.

As equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws affirm, every person is entitled to her or his own religious beliefs and to engage in religious activity accordingly. However, this cannot mean (in the religious context) that one is entitled to deny others their own religious beliefs and activity, or their right to agnosticism, atheism or simple absence of such beliefs. Nor does it mean that one is entitled to harm or bring harm to others by reason of one’s religious beliefs or to take action harmful to others.

In the medical and healthcare context, the edict ‘do no harm’ cannot be countered by recourse to a plea of religious belief. And this brings the argument full circle to the question of whose health and welfare is it. Who is the patient? Who has human rights and personhood?

Ultimately, the question may be whether religious ideology requiring that a woman take a pregnancy to term whatever the circumstances is fixed firmly in the realisation (conscious or unconscious) that, in the end, the putative mother is invariably female.

Voters may thus be rightly concerned as to what place women may have in a policy programme devised and led by an administration that defines personhood ‘profoundly ambiguously’ (as Somanader observes), or elevates fertilisation from an unwanted act of sexual intercourse above a woman’s desire to determine when she will become a mother.

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About the Author

Dr Jocelynne A. Scutt is a Barrister and Human Rights Lawyer in Mellbourne and Sydney. Her web site is here. She is also chair of Women Worldwide Advancing Freedom and Dignity.

She is also Visiting Fellow, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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