Religion versus the right to health care

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.