“It is damning that here in California, where abortion care is a constitutional right, we have a hospital implementing a policy that’s reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said.
A Catholic hospital in Northern California is facing a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general after it reportedly refused to perform an abortion on a woman whose pregnancy was not viable and whose life was in danger.
Anna Nusslock was already in severe crisis when she and her husband Daniel arrived last February at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, according to the suit, which AG Rob Bonta filed Monday in Humboldt County Superior Court. A doctor examined Nusslock, who was 15 weeks pregnant with twins, and told her they would not survive, the suit explains.
Without a dilation and evacuation procedure, or, what is commonly known as “an abortion,” Nusslock was also at risk of death, the complaint contends.
However, it goes on, “Providence refused to allow Anna’s doctors to treat her, as the hospital’s policies prohibited them from terminating a pregnancy so long as they could detect fetal heart tones. The only exception was if the mother’s life was at immediate risk, a high threshold that Anna apparently did not yet reach. Only at some poorly defined point in the future, when Anna was close enough to death, would Providence permit her doctors to intervene. Until then, Anna and her physicians could do nothing but wait, worry, and hope.”
You don’t need religion to do that. I got two words for you: Donald Trump. And it isn’t whataboutism, it’s filling in more context to make a truer and broader point. It just kills the anti-religion jackoff fest the internet loves so much.
There’s plenty that can be awful about religion, and we just make ourselves look stupid when we wrongly try to make its evils singular, exclusive to itself. It’s far less comfortable to see that this is a human thing, rather than a religious thing. Pretending It’s only a religious thing and then not being religious pushes the problem away to a nice, safe distance, where we can talk about “them” and fundamentally leave ourselves out of it.
Do note that religion only ever seems to be a problem when it’s conservative or authoritarian, a pattern that holds for many things outside of religion as well, and with startling consistency.
The comment was:
And you wrote:
That’s the definition of whataboutism.
Religions claim authority and are authoritarian by definition, religion is extremely harmful just by the fact that it preaches immortality. You also don’t need to be conservative to believe in faith healing. There may be few exceptions to the rule, but by far the most religions contain these harmful doctrines.
That’s disingenuous at best.
Religion is a problem when it used to push principles on to other people ( specifically when those principles are harmful and unwelcome ), conservative and authoritarian principles happen to lend themselves to this kind of behaviour quite readily which is why you see criticism aimed at those types of religions.
Perhaps it might be worth looking in to why this consistency exists.