on god and medicine.
so the other day a friend a mine was taken to the grey nuns hospital and it stirred up my thoughts about the caritas health group that have festered for as long as i’ve been in edmonton.
what’s the deal edmonton? as far as i know calgary doesn’t have catholic hospitals so why do we? hospitals are not like schools. you can’t pick and choose which one you go to in an emergency situation. why do we have hospitals that hold ethics other than normal medical ones. religious views should not come into patient care or decisions. i’ve heard stories about not prescribing the morning after pill for emergency contraception and it just made me think about what other ‘ethical issues’ a catholic hospital would have. there’a murky area there that makes me feel uncomfortable.
i’m not entirely sure why there’s a need for catholic hospitals anyway. surely if you have ethical dilemmas you can take care of them yourself? why do we need doctors to force their ethics upon us?
i can even see a religious long-term care facility as a possible opt-in program that would be funded by the state but i do not like the idea of the government funding a healthcare organization that makes decisions based on ethics that may or may not be the same as the patient.
April 21, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Public funding may be a sticking point, but remember that it was the church that first created hospitals, not governments. It was only later that the government decided that health care was their gig. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Yeah, but if my tax dollars are supporting a faith-based group then I should have the right to have some say over what that group does with the money. That sounds good in theory, but let’s not forget that it is your tax dollars that fund aboriginal healing centres as well. Call it “culture” if you wish, but make no mistake about it, they are faith-based if they are evoking mother earth. I am not a Catholic, but I hope that we do not hold a double standard just because we happen to hold a different world view than they do.