Beginning with I Comments

Religious Belief vs. Health Care - Tolerating the Intolerable in Italy

10 comments »

1. I completely agree - those fundamentalist Catholic doctors have no right to foist their beliefs on others who do not share their beliefs. And the lack of outrage at this kind of thing in Italy is disturbing. I’m really shocked at what happenned to that poor girl and her boyfriend in your daughter’s class. I’ve taken the morning after pill myself and I felt scared and embarassed enough without having doctors and nurses jeering at me.

   Apparently, some Catholic doctors also refuse to give decent pain relief to people who are suffering (believing that suffering pain increases your chance of getting into heaven, apparently) and the Catholic lobby was also one of the reason epidurals were not covered by the public healthcare system until very recently (6 months ago) and even now they are hard to get in many hospitals.

   Comment by kataroma — October 10, 2007 @ 7:01 pm

2. Wow. Should I feel thankful that in my country everyone is equally delusional, religiously biased, and sadistic everywhere?

   I agree with you that these people are idiots, but in all honesty, I wish I lived somewhere where I could travel for an hour and get the medical treatment I desired or needed instead of having to travel 4 days and get a passport for the same privilege.

   I say you start (or join) a grassroots movement to stop these types of inequity. Surely there are others that share your ire.

   Comment by Whimspiration — October 11, 2007 @ 8:54 pm

3. I’ve been meaning for some time to write a note to my Italian readers stating that just because I criticize something in Italy doesn’t mean I find nothing to criticize in the US or that I want to live there instead. If I wanted to live in the US, I’d be living there. Italy is my adopted country… wait, I have said all this before: http://www.beginningwithi.com/aboutme/shutup.html

   Comment by webmaster — October 12, 2007 @ 7:19 am

4. Whimspiration - problem is

   a) it’s more than a 16 hour drive from Rome to the border with Swizerland and for others further down the boot it’s even longer.
   b) If you’re resident in Italy, you can’t access healthcare in another EU country without being resident there (except in emergencies). So by the time that poor girl switches her residency to Germany, gets enrolled in the healthcare system there and drives 2-3 days to the border it’ll be too late for the morning after pill.

   Comment by kataroma — October 15, 2007 @ 10:26 am

5. I think the two examples (Muslims in GB and you in Lecco) are kinda’ opposites, while still being very similar. You chose to relocate in Lecco, knowing (I am guessing/hoping/presuming, as you are not of belowaverageintelligence) pretty well what kind of culture you were moving into: a very Catholic area filled with a relatively closed and uniform social more, probably limited acceptance (at least to begin with), not much leeway for “liberal” ethical behavior.
   The muslim doctors in GB knew what they were studying (or going to have to study when they signed up for medical school [if they didn't, all the more reason to flunk them out immediately]): a country where the majority (of non-Muslims) for whom Pubs are a common feature on Friday evenings, binge drinking is common, sexual promiscuity is not particularly frowned upon within certain limits.
   Don’t want to treat heathens and infidels? Study your medicine in a country where they don’t pretend it of you. Don’t like driving a taxi where someone might enter carrying alcoholic beverages? Drive a taxi in a city where that is not permitted, not where it is your problem and not your client’s, since you have chosen a job in a public service.

   Going back to your post on the superlegal American society, I think this is also someway tied to many of the *original* intentions of the federal structure of the USA (most of which have NO resemblance nor trace in the present governmental structure or legal system.
   As one example, there was to be no FEDERAL intervention in Religion (”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”) but several states had and kept State churches at the time of the newly found country. Sort of: “Don’t like our Religion? Go found your own state” (Utah comes to my small, limited mind as a woinderfully fulfilling example). You came here, you chose to come here, you abide by the rules that we have here.
   Nothing about not putting a Manger in the town square because it might offend other religions or citing a God in the nationally approved Pledge of Allegiance to your country of chosen residence. (once it was possible answer an unreasonable request with “tough shit” - no longer, it’s not politically correct)

   I will admit that in Italy, your complaints have more foundation than what I read into the GB problems: there IS a law. But that law was passed after many of the doctors that refuse to comply to its letter were already GPs for many years, plying their trades (and advice - do you remember Marcus Welby that seemed half rabi half father half doctor?) well before they were *forced* to provide these newfangled inventions/medications for their patients (the ethics of which are quite discutable, even if *my* [personal] ethics may accept them).

   And you need to recognize the drastic local differences still today present between even limited geographical distances (a relatively natural federalism). You want atheistic liberalism? you move to college in Bologna and end up staying. You like Catholic conservitism? you go to Cattolica in Milan and take the train every day and in the end open your office in Lecco. All within 1.5h of Milan (FFSS permitting), less than some daily commutes in the US Northeast.

   Comment by James — October 29, 2007 @ 3:07 pm

6. Good points, but some caveats: I did not know much about Lecco when I moved here, and was deeply surprised to find that any part of Italy could be so Catholic as to deny me basic health rights in violation of national law.

   And it’s not so simple here in Italy to “move somewhere else if you don’t like it.” Most Italians prefer to stick close to their origins for many family, cultural, and economic reasons, even when they don’t completely fit in with local culture, and even those who might like to move can find it very difficult to do so.

   Which is why it can be profoundly miserable to be any kind of “misfit” in Italy - I have read some very unhappy stories of gay people living in small towns here. “I’ll move to San Francisco” is an impossible dream for most.

   Comment by webmaster — October 29, 2007 @ 3:50 pm

7. “some caveats: I did not know much about Lecco when I moved here”
   I have difficulty believing that someone with as much international experience as you might not have brought a more “Caveat Emptor” approach in moving there.
   After all, the DC were the majority party in the entire country until not so very long ago, and the conservative Catholic lobby (read the Holy See) has always held quite wide sway with the local legislators (intending to include only those that pass somewhere near or through Rome to vote on national matters).

   While, on many issues, the rest of public opinion has been swayed (not surprisingly, in many cases, by extreme intervention of the “Radical” party) by other nations (American TV being a non-insignificant factor, I think), the general impact has been limited in scope and diffusion.

   I do realize the difficulty of Italians in moving to anywhere they might want, although with the part of my comment on “Bologna-Cattolica” I intended to underline that it is easier (at least somewhat) in recent years to find partial solutions (I think that moving is about as easy within Italy as it was in America 15-20 years ago).

   I tend to mentally and morally separate the problems and (even if mostly recognizably legitimate) complaints of residents that have grown up within and haven’t found an escape from a locally imposed situation from those that throw themselves (more or less knowingly) into the middle of (geographically localized) problems imposed by others that already lived there (often for a VERY long time, even centuries) with their already long standing beliefs and mores. Thus, I have great difficulty equating the problems of Muslim medical students in an Anglican dominated England with gay small-town Italians, with whom I find much greater sympathy in their plight.
   Just to be clear, I find quite unfortunate the problems of the local teenagers that have been subjected to a leftist/liberal/radical education (as many of the Italian teachers in the system today seem to espouse these beliefs) which insisted (correctly, but ingenuosly) on the legalities of the national “law” that then find themselves subjected to the conflicting moral code of the local population (including the resident medical staff). It is one of the problems of periods of great flux, for which more often than not the younger elements tend to pay the highest price. I like to think that it is reassuring to think that once in Italy they (the youngins) may have found themselves in an asylum, instead of just extremely embarrassed.

   Comment by James — October 29, 2007 @ 6:20 pm

8. Ah, but you assume I had a choice about moving to Lecco! Like many/most people, I moved where the job is, specifically my husband’s job. We could have continued living in Milan and he could have commuted, but, though I like Milan, the pollution there was killing me.

   Comment by webmaster — October 29, 2007 @ 6:35 pm

9. Surely the medical practitioners in Lecco have as much right to follow their conscience as you do yours. Why should they be forced into facilitating something they believe to be wrong?

   Comment by Rachel — November 24, 2007 @ 4:20 pm

10. If they were in private practice, they could do as they pleased. Because they are public servants paid through MY taxes, I have trouble with the idea that they can “in conscience” refuse me a service to which I am entitled under Italian law. If they made provisions, e.g. ensuring that there was always a doctor on call who would prescribe morning-after birth control or perform an abortion, I would have no trouble with some doctors’ refusal. But the hospital in Lecco seems to be complicit in a conspiracy to let the radicals run the show. That’s just plain wrong.

    Comment by webmaster — November 24, 2007 @ 4:27 pm

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