Introduction

“Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.” Edward Kennedy’s words champion the face of modern healthcare, where new technologies and practices are being developed to equalize healthcare for all people. However, like any facet of society, it is not immune to prejudice and instilled discrimination. Ohio’s new law allowing many healthcare professionals the right to deny patient care on moral or religious grounds is eliciting a justified, enraged reaction from members of the LGBT community and its advocates. While this law represents the discrimination in state legislature and the branch of public policy itself, it also demonstrates a face of healthcare often never confronted: medical inequality. It is inherently unjust to allow healthcare professionals’ personal or moral objections to obstruct the needs of patients simply based on their identities.

Preface to the Law

While assembling the bi-annual budget bill, Ohio legislators included the additional provision of allocating the right to deny healthcare based on moral or religious grounds into the extensive document. A similar situation regarding the participation of trans children in certain sports was almost situated in Ohio state legislation, but Governor Mike DeWine declined to pass it. However, DeWine showed his support for the addend, as he passed the budget bill and defended his decision to do so. The majority of the medical community in Ohio, including the Ohio State Medical Association and the Ohio Hospital Association, demonstrated serious disapproval of the bill. In addition, local activists and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, including Equality Ohio and the Human Rights Campaign, are rightfully enraged at the seemingly easy acceptance of the bill.

The Bill itself does not specify how care can be restricted to members of the LGBTQ+ community, but it does utilize wording that allows professionals to deny care on certain personal or religious grounds.

History of LGBTQ+ Healthcare

Throughout history, the LGBT community has been often trivialized in healthcare. In the early 20th century, the very self-identification of being queer was considered a mental illness. Psychiatrists and psychologists maintained the status that homosexuality was an aberration, as the DSM confirmed it as a “sociopathic disorder” in 1952. While this cruel labelling lead to increased violence against the queer community, it also barred many individuals from attaining certain jobs and measures of safety from the police itself. Thus, it was considered normal for healthcare professionals to blatantly ignore and look down upon the health issues concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In the mid-twentieth century, the establishment of a strong queer movement gave support for queer individuals. While some continued to visit the very few healthcare professionals who took these issues seriously, a majority relied on practicing self-care and consuming self-help books bolstered by these movements to educate themselves on their health and how it correlated to society as well.

With the rise of the AIDS crisis, LBGT health was further stigmatized and often endangered. The AIDS crisis, a sexually transmitted disease that disproportionately affected gay men in the 1980s, changed the interaction between the medical field and queer individuals. Because of the increasing number of deaths of gay and bisexual men, the public began advocating for mandatory testing, and the Supreme Court upheld the legitimacy of state sodomy laws. While these measures seemed reasonable for public health at the time to many, significant health organizations such as the American Public Health Organization as well as American Psychological Association rejected the notion that these changes would decrease the prevalence of the AIDS virus. On the other hand, organizations and coalitions were formed to create safe spaces for gay and bisexual men, such as San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the New York Men’s Health Crisis. While providing information on the practice of “safer sex” and creating a support system for the LGBT community, they also provided medical, psychological, and social services for those who contracted the virus. These organizations laid the groundwork for the services healthcare would accommodate for queer individuals and helped change society’s perception of those with AIDS.

While the biomedical research behind the AIDS virus took far too long to come up with any findings to alleviate the epidemic, many activists partnered with healthcare workers to create independent research projects to find solutions. These projects were often community-based and developed a new facet to medical research, where the target population was heavily involved in the process. New available treatments and awareness spread by the global AIDS campaign were able to slow the spread of virus as well as pacify the overall population. However, the AIDS epidemic represented a milestone in the relationship between the medical and LGBT communities, where professional organizations and individual healthcare providers were active in trying to find solutions to the epidemic and its devastating effects on gay ad bisexual men.