No. If the oft-used-phrase is true “what if that guy’s is the only doctor in Mehamm and all the women in the town get unwanted pregnancies?”
If Harald Solberg M.D. doesn’t want to refer for abortions and is told “refer of leave” and he decided to leave, then the good people of Mehamm are left with no doctor until another one decides to go there.
Hence warmer (no abortion) rather than cold (no doctor).
Well, I did read post #16 by Septima, a resident of Norway, where he said:
Now the business about abortions being easier to obtain in Denmark is just an assumption. But it IS much smaller than Norway. Much, much smaller.
[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]
No. If the oft-used-phrase is true “what if that guy’s is the only doctor in Mehamm and all the women in the town get unwanted pregnancies?”
If Harald Solberg M.D. doesn’t want to refer for abortions and is told “refer of leave” and he decided to leave, then the good people of Mehamm are left with no doctor until another one decides to go there.
Hence warmer (no abortion) rather than cold (no doctor).
[/QUOTE]
You seem to have the argument the wrong way round. Doctors have been required to refer for abortion since 1975. It’s a bit late for Harald Solberg M.D. to get a bug up his butt at this point, no?
Virtually every doctor practicing today went into the profession knowing what the breaks where. The system has been working perfectly for over a generation.
The proposed new “right” for doctors to refuse to refer is not only offensive and morally bankrupt, it is also profoundly silly. It’s posturing, plain and simple.
So. A so-called “socially progressive” country forces people to do something and now, they could get back their right of freedom of conscience.
If freedom of conscience is posturing, then, you’re the classic person that is so proud of their tolerance, except when they have to tolerate something they really don’t like.
Maybe Harald will be happy now or maybe the governemnt will tell you to do something you really despise and “it’s working perfectly” will have a new meaning for you.
“Freedom of Conscience”?
Like, if my conscience said it is good to kill black people, I should be able to do that? If it said I should take whatever I wanted from anybody, society should be OK with it? If my conscience told me to torture children, It would be oppressive to stop me?
Preventing people from doing bad things is what governments are for. Mistreating your patients is bad, mkay?
I’ll repeat: The law ONLY APPLIES TO GOVERNMENT DOCTORS. Any doctor with conscience trouble can go into private practice. He doesn’t have to stop being a doctor, he just has to stop taking out tax money.
Yes, I do think the government gets to dictate what their employees can and cannot do on the job. Funny that.
Maybe you could read a bit about democracy and petitioning the government; it’s gonna help a lot.
I have no time for really stupid examples, if you haven’t figured out the differences betwenen my example and yours, it’s going to take some Norwegian, state-paid, psychiatric help for you to get it.
As I understand it, you think being a government employee makes you a state-paid bitch.
Maybe Quisling is still working to make everyone follow order and shut up.
We shot Quisling. And he didn’t make people follow orders and shut up, he sucked at it. Maybe use examples you’re actually familiar with?
You’re right. My examples were extreme. But I don’t see where they differ in principle.
To me, it looks like you think one persons “Freedom of conscience” is more important than another persons freedom from pain, right to proper treatment, and dignity. Well, you have a perfect right to that opinion, but I don’t share it, and I certainly don’t want a country built on it. “Conscience”, in my opinion, should never be an excuse to treat other people badly. Ones first duty is to be a kind and decent person. Everything else is secondary.
But we are arguing in circles here. You have your opinion and I have mine, and that is fine. Best to let it go, I think.
I argue for market based policy a lot, and this makes things better in my view. Of course, my basic contention is that the government should not be involved in (especially tertiary) healthcare, but that’s another thread altogether.
Yes, market based health care works so well in the US. :rolleyes:
Background fact #1: Norway has a decently functioning public health care system. The municipalities employ doctors for GP services for the population - mostly in smaller towns - and there’s a number of privately employed or self-employed doctors in the larger towns/cities. All of these provide public health care, where the patient pays a deductible of some 200NOK (~35USD) per visit, and the rest is covered by the state.
Background fact #2: In many small places, the publicly employed doctor is the only doctor for miles, and it may take several hours’ of travel to reach another doctor.
Background fact #3: Any certified doctor who wants to provide services that the government doesn’t want to pay for, like cosmetic surgery, is free to start a private practice. The same with a doctor who wants to provide fast-track services for those who can pay and don’t want to wait a couple of weeks for an appointment or sit in line a few hours in the ER. Those services are paid in full by the patient. Such services are naturally only available in the larger cities of Norway, as the market for such services is minuscule in a small town out in the boonies
Background fact #4: Every resident of Norway is entitled to a GP appointment. To facilitate that, Norway has a system called the “fastlegeordning”. You sign up on the list of your GP of choice, provided that doctor has room on the list, and that’s the doctor you go to. You can switch to another doctor twice a year, unless you move to another place.
From the facts cited above, I’d say it’s pretty obvious that women in the districts may well be left without options. Even in a larger town, switching doctors takes a bit of time, and since abortion is limited to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy…
And, as Septima points out, we’ve had free abortion since 1975. Nineteen-fucking-seventyfive. Never has any doctor been obliged to perform abortions if s/he has a problem with that. The new rule of allowing doctors to refuse a referral to the hospital for a procedure that has been a rght since nineteen-fucking-seventyfive is nothing more and nothing less than the Christian Nutters trying to chip away on a right that Norwegian women has had for almost forty fucking years.
Yeah, and:
Most of them. As our PM, he’s been non-confrontational to a fault.
Don’t you fucking joke about Scandinavian moose ! These things are a menace. Also, sometimes they swim into Denmark and the Danes freak out and run for the hills. And then they get all sorts of confused 'cause they can’t find any hills in Denmark.
It is a serious problem.
[QUOTE=SanVito]
Can I ask a question re: the blue party thing? Because, in the UK, blue = right wing/conservative and red = left/labour, whereas it’s obviously arse about face in the US, which never fails to confuse me.
So, are ‘blue’ parties typically to the right, politically, in Norway? Or is the colour just coincidence?
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Red = left and blue = fascist pig-dogs, I mean right, is the standard pretty much all over.
The reason it’s arse backwards in the US is because their current colour scheme is much more recent and doesn’t draw from the same well of symbolism at all - used to be one party was assigned red and the other blue on TV for election coverage, then they’d switch the next time around. Note that both the Democratic Donkey and the Republican Elephant have red and blue in them.
But for some reason, I think it was during/after Bush v. Gore thing, people started talking about “blue states are like this” and “red states are like *this” *and it stuck. So now the right-wingers look like ardent socialists :p.
Yeah, forgot the color thing. Blue is always right wing/conservative and red is always left wing/worker’s parties/“socialists”. But some parties are green instead, or a combination. They can be whatever. Most of these cluster in the middle, except the brand new Environmental Party, which is green for obvious reasons, and hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. They seem to be lefties on social issues, but you never can tell these things.
Oh, and apparently we have to teach lots more Christianity in schools now. That’s not going cause trouble in inner city schools or anything. Wonder what they traded for that little gem?
…and Left + Christian People’s Party got amnesty for about 170 of the 750 children who have been stuck in limbo for years (un-returnable asylum seekers), in return for closed asylum camps/prisons for an as-yet-undetermined-number of other asylum seekers. As one commentator put it: “Best deal since Faust.”
(I really, really can’t understand why Labour has been so harsh against those kids. It’s so obviously, grossly inhuman to keep people - especially children - stuck in an extralegal limbo for years. And it prevents these people from becoming productive members of society. Experiences from other countries show that limited amnesties in similar cases have little or no impact on future numbers of asylum seekers. My best guess is that Labour thought they could prevent leaking voters to the Progressive Party if they were sufficiently hardass against those scary immigrants – some of them even - gasp! - wear headscarves! :eek: )
Oh, yes, you do:
This is one of the issues where the members of our Labor-dominated government - led by our ball-less Labor PM - have shown themselves to be spineless amoebas catering to the basest instincts of the voter populace. Just a couple of weeks after the previous election - where I chose to vote Labor as it seemed the best way of keeping the right-wingers out of Government, much due to their racist and xenophobic rhetoric - the government imposed tougher regulations for refugees and asylum seekers to Norway. On a level hardly better than the right-wingers’ demands. They¹ have been chanting the slogan “strict, but fair refugee politics” ( :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: ) for four years now.
¹ The Labor party
We’ll see about that. The current religion/ethics curriculum was developed after the previous one - with a higher proportion of christianity - was deemed to be against the human rights by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. I wouldn’t be surprised of someone raised that issue again…
That’s one of the things I like about Scandanavia. Here in the US such a declaration would get you laughed at. Kindness and decency are things you listen to the preacher spout off about in church between bouts of justifying hatred of gays and (fill in the blank, depending upon church). They have no basis in politics!
[QUOTE=2square4u]
We’ll see about that. The current religion/ethics curriculum was developed after the previous one - with a higher proportion of christianity - was deemed to be against the human rights by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. I wouldn’t be surprised of someone raised that issue again…
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Lets hope it gets thrown out, causing the CNP to have a hissy fit, and refuse to cooperate from now on.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
That’s one of the things I like about Scandanavia. Here in the US such a declaration would get you laughed at. Kindness and decency are things you listen to the preacher spout off about in church between bouts of justifying hatred of gays and (fill in the blank, depending upon church). They have no basis in politics!
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Thank you. We do try.
What’s tertiary healthcare?
From wiki