Deborah Lipp

Via Mahablog comes the story of an anti-choice EMT fired because she refused to transport a patient who was supposed to get an abortion.

Naturally, she’s suing. First reaction: WATB doesn’t even begin to describe this pathetic excuse for humanity.

But as Barbara points out, her story doesn’t add up:

…who calls an ambulance just for an elective abortion? There’s got to be more to this story that Adamson isn’t admitting. Such as, what sort of medical emergency required the patient to go to a hospital by ambulance to terminate her pregnancy?

Washington Post reporter Rob Stein must’ve been asleep when he wrote this. Alarm bells should have gone off in his head that he’d better call the ambulance company and get its side of the story. Is Anderson lying when she says the patient’s chart said elective abortion? Did the chart in fact say therapeutic abortion, and Anderson either misread it or doesn’t know the difference between elective and therapeutic? Did the person who initiated the chart write the word elective by mistake? Had the patient already undergone an elective abortion but was having complications that required emergency medical treatment? If in fact the young woman was having no medical problems and simply wanted an elective abortion, who did the ambulance company expect to bill for the ambulance ride, since no insurance company I’ve ever heard of would have paid such a bill? And why didn’t she just take a cab?

I suspect Adamson just saw the word abortion on the chart and refused to transport the patient, no matter what the patient’s emergency was. In which case the ambulance company was correct to fire her.

I’m very wary of assuming facts based on what ‘must’ be the case, but it sure looks like Adamson is either lying or not telling the whole story…and the reporter fell for it.

But this is just one (major) point in a story that is just as bad overall. Adamson’s (dubious) story is just the hook for a whole article about medical providers ‘struggling’ with their ‘consciences‘–over abortion, over sterilization, over contraception, even over Viagra. The story is chock full of sob stories like Adamson’s, with lengthy quotes from people suffering terrible anguish at the prospect of aiding and abetting someone’s ‘immoral’ behavior. The total number of balancing quotes (from, say, women denied medical services, or health care professionals who put the public welfare above their own shoddy prejudices) is–let’s see, nothin’ plus nothin’, carry the nothin’–zero.

And when specific sob stories aren’t enough, the reporter pulls one of the classically dishonest reporter’s tricks of throwing in stories with no specifics at all:

Family practitioners and obstetrician-gynecologists describe moving from town to town and being shunned by colleagues because they do not want to dispense birth control or morning-after pills or perform sterilizations or abortions.

Shunned! By colleagues! Moving! From Town! to Town! Because they refused to do their motherfucking job!

How tragic!

Just for perspective, maybe they should talk to the people who have been shunned, harassed, threatened, assaulted, and occasionally killed because they did do their jobs–and because it happened to be a job of which people like Stephanie Adamson disapprove.

These people have no clue about who’s really persecuting whom. Neither, unfortunately, does the Washington Post.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]