Letters to the Editor - The Lakeville Journal - 7-7-22

Understand the divide over abortion

The news about the now infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study came out in 1972. In 1973 the Roe v. Wade decision was made by the Supreme Court. In 1974 I started medical school in Canada. For an elective in my first or second year I took a course in medical ethics that had just been started in the university Philosophy Department. Our textbook was “The Patient as Person” by Paul Ramsey, a Christian theologian. It was published in New Haven in 1970.

During that course one of the discussions centered around the controversy over abortion and the context was learning about the two different ethical approaches used by people to evaluate what is right. Deontologists decide what is right based on a rigid set of principles (think the Ten Commandments) usually having an origin outside of themselves (God, the law, a parent). Teleologists decide what is right by trying to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. It is an inner-self based decision and less easily determined than the deontological kind.  “De”, of course, refers to God. “Teleo” is Greek for end or goal. I realized at that time that the abortion issue was never going to go away because the divide in moral approaches is too deep.

The course had a profound impact on me as a graduate physician. Just think of the title of the book, “The Patient as Person.”  The patient is not their disease, not an organ in room 306, not a product being churned through an industrialized medical or surgical procedure but a whole being, with a right to know, a right to decide for him or herself, a right to choose how to live and how to die. Later I latched onto Dr. Peter Reyelt’s coattails when he created the first medical ethics committee at Sharon Hospital and I became its second chair after him. It was a very useful committee that created guidelines and solved dilemmas for the hospital’s physicians. I can’t imagine it still exists, or it would never let Nuvance continue in their quest to diminish services and thereby cause harm to patients.

Anna Timell

West Cornwall

Primary care is our highest priority

As the chair of Primary Care at Nuvance Health, I work closely with Sharon Hospital’s leaders and community physicians to expand access to primary care across Sharon Hospital’s service area. This work is essential to creating a healthier community, but it also poses many challenges, such as recruiting and retaining practitioners to our many types of medical settings, especially in rural health environments. Today’s critical workforce shortage has further increased the challenges we face.

In a rural market like ours, we must be creative to attract new talent to the area to build and maintain a strong primary care infrastructure for the future. Please know we are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts.

In addition, we are partnering with our region’s public officials to pursue a Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) designation to lower the barriers we currently experience in our recruitment efforts. Together with our current medical professionals and Sharon Hospital’s community board, we continue to identify strategies for attracting new clinicians to the area and create a supportive and welcoming environment upon their arrival.

In fact, our local recruitment committee — led by our board of directors — spearheaded the newly released Sharon Hospital recruitment video, which featured local actors and trusted Sharon Hospital physicians discussing what they love about this community hospital and our region.

I am happy to share that through these myriad efforts, we have hired three new primary care professionals in the last year.

The new members of our team are Tamar Wilms and Karen Arel, Nurse Practitioners, and most recently, a Harvard Medical School educated physician who will join the Sharon Hospital team in September as a primary care clinician.

These new clinicians join a team of professionals who have been providing top-notch primary care to residents across Sharon Hospital’s service area for many years. As we welcome new primary care clinicians and continue recruitment, we appreciate the continued dedication of our long-time teammates. We are working hard to ensure they are supported in serving this community.

We will continue to get creative in attracting new clinicians so we can transform care to best support the needs of our community into the future. We look forward to continuing to partner with Sharon Hospital’s board, community physicians, and entire community in this important work.

Cornelius Ferreira, MD

Chair, Primary Care at Nuvance Health

Sharon

Daylilies, not lilies

Just a little comment to the photo on the opinion page: true – when people think “lilies” these days, they most often think daylilies, which are unrelated to true lilies. The depicted common orange daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) is an invasive nuisance, taking over and sometimes replacing our native and beautiful Canada lilies (lilium canadense), which used to be common along roadsides and in meadows.

These daylilies are almost impossible to eradicate and — if at all — ought to be planted only in a confining container.

Fritz  Mueller

Sharon

The Robbers’ Court: Raiders of democracy

“If the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court… the people will have ceased to be their own rulers. . . .”

— Abraham Lincoln

Prior to 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court celebrated The Marshall Court, The Warren Court, The Burger Court, chagrinned by The Taney Court, the only Court upending an act of Congress — Missouri Compromise- producing the Dred Scot decision. At the time, 1854, the New York Courier reported “The Court, in trying this case, is itself on trial.”

Over 233 years, 16 Courts have been named for their Chief Justice. When SCOTUS history is recorded for 2005 until now, it shall not be named for the Chief Justice who did not steer it. Rather this Court will be named for its behavior — the Robbers’ Court. Today’s Court seated with an overwhelming religious affiliation and a proclivity to dismiss decades, centuries of Court law, will be infamous, will be recorded as seeing itself untethered to what has been, what is the will of the people.

The Robbers’ Court conservative justices boast they are in no way beholden to the American public, they proclaim law, they work in the Shadows, they target established law with stare decisis abandonment, they are experts on climate, vaccines, women’s health.  Alito recoils on rights emerging as society expands and alters.  He proclaims “those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text.” Justice Alito with colleagues rob the nation of its Ninth Amendment:  “‘The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”. 

Separation of church and state for Alito is deformed as he asserts religious voice is at least equal to secular. Religions in the US are varied, numerous with precepts not always in harmony. Catholic, protestant, evangelical Christians are not aligned on key issues nor with Jewish, Islam, Hindi, Buddhists. Alito seems narrow in his definition of “religion”, “religious.”  Religious minorities including Americans not religious are ignored in the religious ardor of a court with six Justices of one sect.

There is more. Anne Gorsuch Burford, Reagan era Administrator of the EPA, slashed the EPA’s budget then resigned under a scandal in 1983.

What she couldn’t do, her son, Justice Gorsuch, has done in 2022, diminished the EPA-stealing its oversight of notorious green-house gases.  “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening,” said Justice Kagan in dissent.

The Robbers’ Court as the Taney Court is itself on trial: tyrants of time and equity, simpletons of costs and harm, usurpers of power and privilege, parasites on democracy, dissemblers of justice — a pact of willful destruction.  This Court has trampled our past, smothered our present, is stealing our future.

It is but year one.

Kathy Herald-Marlowe

Sharon