Tragic decisions by lawmakers and in emergency rooms

Re: “Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant women,” April 20 news story

Apparently, the Hippocratic Oath no longer matters, nor does a federal law ordering emergency rooms to treat pregnant women in distress.

I find it shameful that medical personnel would rather save their job than risk saving a pregnant woman’s life. I hope that they feel guilty every day of their life. Every physician in this country should feel guilty and ashamed.

Every physician in this country should form a protest group to get these harmful laws changed. They are not spectators in this issue. They should be fighting with all their resources to ensure that doctors make medical decisions, not legislatures or judges who have little or no knowledge of medical issues.

Nor should any one group of people be making medical decisions for anyone other than themselves. Put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine that the government decided that every family was allowed one child only. A woman would be forced to have an abortion for any succeeding pregnancy. The Chinese didn’t like this law. I imagine that those who feel they should be able to make decisions for others might reconsider their position if this happened. — Rochelle Padzensky, Denver

The article is yet another example of “man’s inhumanity to man” — and especially to woman.

After nearly three-fourths of a century of being treated like a person without a brain, without a right to choose for myself, substandard wages based on my gender, lack of control over my (now defunct) reproductive rights, medical advice based on studies that focus on the opposite gender, being told what to do because I’m not of the opposite gender, etc., I am tired, fed up and disgusted. I neither have expectation of changes that truly grant life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness equally regardless of gender, age, economic standing or race. Nor do I have much hope.

Those who appear to carry the power in our society have no clue nor understand that of which I speak because they have the privilege of never having experienced it themselves. — Mariann Storck, Wheat Ridge