The Medical Right.

A fantastic article about the medical right, by Kathryn Tucker (wicked smart legal counsel for Compassion & Choices, end of life rights group) at the Journal of Legal Medicine. While her work is on religious imposition on patients' rights at the end of life, her logic and rationale apply directly to women's reproductive rights - indeed to all patients' rights. A quick clip: Medical Right organizations are delving ever more deeply into activism, policy promotion, and politics. They are expanding the range of issues they work on, forming new organizations, and consciously taking front and center roles in media and legal debates. The RCRC Report points out that the Medical Right has created a virtual “shadow medical establishment.” [FN8] Unlike *498 professional societies that represent physicians and other health care providers, medical schools, and teaching hospitals, most of the Medical Right groups are relat- ively unknown because they act outside of the normal channels of medical policy and practice. Evidence of the shadow medical establishment can be found in legislatures, the courts, and obscure profes- sional societies and journals. The goal is to establish an alternative body of medical fact to validate beliefs of the Christian Right and thereby advance its political agenda. Want proof that she strikes a cord? Here's Wesley J. Smith, everyones favorite "pro-life" patriot and Discovery Institute fellow, going wacko over Tucker's article, conscience clauses, informed consent and referrals. I know I've been banging the Establishment drum pretty hard lately but it is the drum that the Religious Right, the Medical Right - and if I may, the Legal Right - fear the most.