We’re mostly on the same page, I think. I’m certainly against the bill described because it does seem likely to cause undue hardship. But it does seem to me that someone who cannot in good conscience perform an abortion ought to still be able to be a doctor. Paving it over as a matter of “the job description includes abortions” strikes me as needlessly restrictive. Most jobs generally require consistent attendance, but summarily dismissing any woman who needs to take time off after childbirth is still needlessly discriminatory.

Just as there’s a place for female professionals who want to have children, there’s a place for pro-life doctors. There’s enough non-abortion work in any hospital to justify the employment of doctors who don’t perform them. The lack of flexibility may justify a slightly smaller paycheck, but I don’t see why otherwise qualified individuals ought to be turned away because they won’t provide one particular sort of treatment.

I’d agree with you that a pharmacy ought not to hire someone against filling birth control prescriptions if that person is ever going to be the only employee available – it strikes me as perfectly sensible discrimination. Likewise, if you needed just one person to fill a sensitive position day in and day out, you’d be fully justified in stipulating that maternity leave wouldn’t be available. But, if your pharmacy has multiple employees, and if at least one is always present who is willing to fill birth control prescriptions, I don’t see the problem in having others who won’t. I don’t think the slight gain in efficiency justifies shutting a large number of people out of these jobs.

The distinction between the above sorts of cases and a doctor who refuses to prescribe psychiatric medication is that the latter isn’t something that patients can reasonably take into account beforehand. Everyone knows what an abortion is – you don’t need a doctor to explain the alternatives to childbirth – and the patients for whom abortion is a relevant procedure can be easily distinguished. A hospital could fairly infallibly make sure that an anti-abortion doctor simply never had anything to do with a patient who might consider an abortion, but that’s a much harder trick to pull off with psychiatric medication. Barring devout Scientologists from medical professions results in a much greater increase in efficiency relative to the harm to job-seekers involved.

Gotchaye, I don’t see it that way. The exemption for pacifists in a draft bill gives them an exemption into being coerced into military service based on their objection to any and all military service, not objection specifically to the particular military service they were drafted for (i.e., it’s granted for “I object to serving in any war,” but not granted for “I object to serving in a war in Iraq or Iran but am willing to serve in Darfur or South America”).

Not to mention, a big aspect of the conscientious objector aspect for drafts is that the draft’s coercive: you’re drafted. I’m fairly certain people who enlist voluntarily can’t subsequently claim conscientious objector status. I am certain they don’t deserve it. So, unless people have started getting drafted into medical school and pressed into hospitals, I don’t think the “conscientious objector” idea flies. I look at it more as a situation of, “This is the job description, these are the duties, if you object to any one of them and are unwilling to perform all of them to the best of your ability (or your ability is insufficient), you are unfit for the job, good-bye.”

Yes, as I see it, this law exempts pharmacists and doctors from punishment, such as getting fired, for refusing to carry out the duties of their voluntarily selected profession. The only situation where a pharmacist, whose job description amounts to “Be an intelligent vending machine for prescribed medications” has any business refusing to fill any prescription is when it’s because of something like knowing the medication will have a harmful drug interaction with another prescription that patient’s taking. It’s one thing to protect a pharmacist who refuses to fill a Vicodin prescription because their records show the person’s already taking Nardil, and in their professional judgment giving opiates to someone taking an MAOI is too likely to result in death. That pharmacist, it’s fine to say their employer can’t punish them. It’s another thing altogether to protect a pharmacist who refuses to fill a prescription for Nardil – or to go with something a more common antidepressant, Zoloft – because they believe in the anti-psychiatry movement. That pharmacist, their employer has every right (and, I think, duty to their customers) to reprimand or fire – even if the pharmacist’s honestly-given reason is that they are a Scientologist and to fill an anti-depressant prescription violates their sincerely held religious beliefs. These sort of laws (which are extremely common at the state level as applied to pharmacists and contraceptives) are every bit as wrong, as I see it, as would be one with the effect of prohibiting a facility from firing a doctor for refusing to ever prescribe psychiatric medications, or a pharmacist who refused ever to fill them.

Bush’s redefinition of abortion is laughable. Even most conservative politicians have heard testify that 60-80% of fertilized human embryos fail to implant naturally. Half of them are otherwise healthy and have the capacity to grow into healthy babies, were they to implant within a week to week and a half following fertilization.

It’s difficult for me to accept that the rewording could possibly be based on Bush’s actual beliefs, or the beliefs of most conservatives even. Rather, its a backdoor way of making contraception less obtainable and it’s clearly visible. There is a reason that religious conservatives draw parallels on issues of contraception and abortion, and even stem-cell research. And that reason is not really to reduce the amount of “murders” of innocent embryos and fetuses, especially when many would “die” naturally anyhow. By stark contrast, the end-goal is to remove the freedoms of our society that, while providing women with personal privacy and security regarding their own bodies, also permit behavior that religious conservatives view as morally repellent. They want to reduce promiscuity – plain and simple.

On the other hand, I do think that the upside you mention is a really big deal. McCain supporting this is just about the best argument imaginable for former Clinton supporters to rally to Obama, and McCain opposing this is going to further splinter the Republican party. Many women will understand this as purely an attack on their gender, and many evangelicals will understand it as purely a defense of personal convictions. My feeling is that McCain is going to support this, with a lot of unintentionally ironic talk about respecting personal choices; I’ve increasingly been of the belief that evangelicals are just a few more betrayals away from not trusting any politicians not in Huckabee’s mold.