(San Francisco, California) In a unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday that doctors cannot withhold care to gays and lesbians based on their religious beliefs.
"Lambda legal maintained she was denied because of her sexual orientation."
The Court was considering the case of a woman who was denied fertility treatments because she is a lesbian and was not married.
The case began in 2001 when Guadalupe Benitez filed suit against Drs. Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton after they refused to artificially inseminate her, claiming to do so would violate their religious beliefs.
A lower court ruled that the doctors could not use religion as a defense, but in 2005 a state appeals court struck down the ruling ,saying that the doctors were within their rights because they based their decision on Benitez’s unmarried status and that discrimination based on marital status is not prohibited by state law.
Represented by Lambda Legal Benitez appealed to the California Supreme Court.
Benitez alleges that after she had received 11 months of preparatory treatment from the North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group clinic in San Diego, and at “the critical and brief moment when Benitez needed to be inseminated,” Brody and Fenton refused to inseminate her.
Both Brody and Fenton said that because of their personal religious beliefs about gay people, they would not administer the treatment Benitez had been promised. In court papers the doctors also said they object to treating unmarried heterosexual women and they claim that their fundamentalist Christian beliefs exempt them from California’s civil rights laws.
http://www.365gay.com/news/081808-lesbian-ivf/
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