> Jobs have requirements

Most of the argument is whether this requirement is in the "employee must wash hands before surgery" category, which is about the patients' right to be safe not the employee's (in theory the patients didn't "choose" to be there).

The people complaining are reacting as if the ruling sounds like "male high school teachers get vasectomies, to keep teenage pregnancies down", because the effects are "permanent, * upto six months" and directly to your body without it being an on-the-job requirement.

The part that makes me leery is that these sort of "are your vaccines upto-date" checklists have always existed, but this time it is controversial (or maybe it was for MMR - but it wasn't news).

>checklists have always existed

this is also the first time where the vaccine industry and the broader public health space have been put under this kind of scrutiny and the combination of politicization, outright lies and deception over masks and policy in both directions and the overall visibility of the sausage making process happens to be occurring alongside a decline of trust in institutional expertise. when most people got their tetanus shots, the faces of the medical profession were not acting as explicitly political agents.

I don't think you can argue that it's the medical profession's fault that this issue has become politicized without acknowledging that the GOP deserves most of the blame here.

Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.

Not saying those in power have gotten it all right 100% of the time; I'm especially disappointed with the mask fiasco you mention, but... c'mon. Doctors are not acting as "political agents" in the vast majority of situations that have caused the US's pandemic response to be as lacking as it's been.

> Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.

It's not common sense if a plurality of people don't agree with it. Denying children in-person schooling for a year wasn't "common sense", cancelling elective procedures like cancer screenings wasn't "common sense", forcing people to wear masks outdoors wasn't "common sense", and so on. Lots of people were denied rights in these cases and would consider those measures unacceptable.

It's common-sense in that the large majority of medical professionals agree that those measures are a good idea. Those ideas are non-controversial amongst experts.

frankly there is plenty of blame to go around among partisans starting with the complete and total looting of our pandemic response capabilities that occurred during the obama years or the bipartisan offshoring of nearly all our capacity to produce medical supplies and allowing consolidation to make hospitals utterly brittle in the face of a crisis. the lies and poor decisions are numerous enough from all sides that it really is not interesting to play the blame game about who is worse, residents of either team will always believe their lies were noble and mistakes justified while the 'other' is the source of all the real problems. the end result is the same, efficacy and legitimacy of administrators has cratered and i cannot honestly blame anyone who does not trust these institutions to act in good faith anymore.

so you'd be cool with employers banning employees who get an abortion.

something, something, consequences.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately done it a lot lately. We ban that sort of account because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

If having had an abortion materially negatively impacted a healthcare worker's ability to safely provide healthcare to a sick person, then yes, that should probably be grounds for disallowing those people from working as healthcare practitioners. Thankfully that's not the case.

That's actually quite likely legal already.

If expect there are certain Catholic organizations who would fire you if you admitted to having had an abortion.

Your intuition is correct (in that there's no over-arching precedent or Constitutionally-derived right that makes it illegal), but it's specifically banned under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as per a 1978 law modifying the act. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/pregnancy-discrimination-act-1...

... Which goes to the court ruling that's the topic of the article: Congress has the power to decide these issues.

does being vaccinated stop you from spreading it to your co-workers?

what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines? how does it impact that employer?

> does being vaccinated stop you from spreading it to your co-workers?

It significantly reduces the likelihood that you spread it to your coworkers (and, perhaps more importantly, to the old and sick people that healthcare workers tend to serve). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...

> what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines? how does it impact that employer?

Obviously vaccine requirements for remote workers don't make a ton of sense in principle, but in practice I worry that an exemption for remote employees would result in a lot of people getting mis-coded (intentionally or otherwise) as remote and ultimately showing up at work unvaccinated and putting vulnerable people at risk.

> does being vaccinated stop you from spreading it to your co-workers?

To a significant degree.

> what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines?

This case wasn't about them.

How about if it's the 1960s, and you're a flight attendant, and "being sexy" is semi-officially part of your job. And your job is requiring you to get an abortion (which is still illegal in the US, and so you're going to have to go to Sweden to get it). And if you won't, well, nobody's making you - you can get a different job.

This is, as far as I can see, the most directly analogous situation. Those who support vaccine mandates, how do you feel about this situation? (And note that this was just an "unofficial" employee mandate - there was no government entity involved.)

Pregnancy was explicitly added as a protected characteristic under the Civil Rights Act in 1978. Government has a bona fide interest in preventing conduct that could discourage people from becoming pregnant. It has no interest in encouraging people to remain unvaccinated against deadly communicable diseases, and in fact it has an interest in exactly the opposite of that. Accordingly, unvaccinated people aren’t a protected class, nor should they be.

Also, this is a minor point but illegal abortions are many orders of magnitude more risky than COVID vaccines.

I strongly oppose broad-reaching government-imposed vaccine mandates, but I strongly support a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers specifically. The US government has already taken on the responsibility for setting employment eligibility standards for healthcare workers, and it makes sense for being vaccinated to be one of those criteria.

If you truly believe that these situations are comparable, I don't think I could expect you to engage in good-faith discussion.

That's a handy way for you to dismiss the point, while completely refusing to engage with it. But that's OK. You can expect whatever you expect.

I think the two situations are comparable in some ways, and not in others. The "have to do something medical in order to keep your job" part is one of the ways it's comparable. The "bodily autonomy" is another. It's different in that it's not a government mandate. It's different in how it affects others.

So: Did you actually want to engage, or did you just want to give a plausible dismissal?