Denying women's rights to equal healthcare

As a woman, I have often stated I would have no interest in living in most of the world before New York in 1968. My reasons for this are pretty straight forward. Most women throughout the recorded history of the world did not have equal rights before the law, and in the modern world they have certainly been denied equal rights to health care and health research. It is only in startlingly recent times that the medical establishment figured out that women might get heart disease for reasons different than men and that maybe they needed to research women as well. While I don't want to deny there were probably some societies and some wealthy women within certain societies that had privileges that equaled or exceeded that of some men within those societies, I do not feel that is true of most of my ancestors, and I am concerned about how little access to fair healthcare women get today.

Most disturbing to me at present is the death throes of the Bush administration and its attempts to deny women equal healthcare on the basis of "morality." Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards described this attempt today in a passionate and important editorial for The New York Times. A pharmacist should, as described by the great Stephen Colbert, be allowed to dispense viagra unchecked but can choose not to fill a birth control prescription. That's no big deal if you live in Manhattan because there is bound to be another pharmacist who will, but if you live in the middle of Mississippi or Western New York or any other place that is more sparsely populated, you are out of luck in having the freedom to choose the pill. And the birth control pill is not just useful as a contraceptive. I was a teenage girl who had incredibly irregular and painful periods, and the pill straightened that out. The pill has also been proven to help prevent certain forms of cancer.

But that's not the point, the point is that taking the Hippocratic Oath means you must provide me the healthcare I request and not what suits your morality, if that morality conflicts with healthcare if that healthcare is necessary and broadly approved by my own cultural and moral traditions. What if a white supremacist doctor felt that all non-white people didn't deserve healthcare treatment, that morally he was degrading the world's population by helping them live? We would have a problem with that wouldn't we?

So, that said, I want to at least leave you with Stephen Colbert's now, to me, classic meditation on this subject.