Annnnnd It's Gone

Natural rights discourse reaches Sacramento, dies

What is a right? Where does it come from, and how does it work?

One view is that human beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Rights precede government, so they can’t come from government, and legitimate government can’t take a right away, or allow someone else to eliminate it; government’s proper role is to defend rights, and government that doesn’t do so loses legitimacy. (I’m looking at you, Justin. Nice hair, though.)

But here’s a tiny window onto the conception of rights that comes with the late-stage administrative state, a bureaucracy that shapes human societies — or aspires to, or pretends to — like a rulemaking factory, or like a gardener.

We’ve become familiar with the inhuman horror of nursing home and hospital patients dying alone because of Covid isolation rules. As one doctor wrote, in a disturbingly recent op-ed:

Mark (I changed his name to protect his anonymity) took his last breath later that night. His children kept him company by video on a tablet next to his bed and asked us to hold his cold hand for them…

Inevitably, we make the final phone calls to share that their loved ones are dying and it is time to say goodbye, often over a blurry video from a tablet kept in a plastic bag. We know well what an abysmal option this is. It is devastating to me that two years later, we are still making these fuzzy video calls for families to say goodbye.

During an end-of-life visit in which two visitors come for one paltry hour, an arbitrary time limit, we are unfairly tasked by hospital leadership with pulling loved ones away after this mere hour. Families must now choose who gets to say goodbye. These loved ones say goodbye knowing they are leaving their relative to die alone.

An Associated Press investigation at the end of 2020 — actual journalism! — suggested that nursing home patients were dying of neglect in facilities governed by pandemic rules and staffing crises, and from “a mental state plunged into despair by prolonged isolation.”

In response to this barbaric cruelty, several states have now passed “No Patient Left Alone” laws, protecting the visitation rights of hospital and nursing home patients even during a pandemic. Here’s Florida’s, for example, which requires that healthcare facilities allow visitors when (for example), a patient “used to talk and interact with others” but is “experiencing emotional distress, is seldom speaking, or is crying more frequently than he or she did previously.” Let us pass in silence over the fact that this has to be passed as a law for medical facilities to take notice of it.

California has not passed a “No Patient Left Alone” law, because the legislature is busy trying to sexualize childhood and prevent dissent, so we’re left with the regulatory parameters of the state’s list of Patients’ Rights. Here’s what the regulations say about the right of hospital patients to have visitors:

A list of these patients' rights shall be posted in both Spanish and English in appropriate places within the hospital so that such rights may be read by patients. This list shall include but not be limited to the patients' rights to:

[…]

17. Designate visitors of his/her choosing, if the patient has decision-making capacity, whether or not the visitor is related by blood, marriage, or registered domestic partner status, unless:

a. No visitors are allowed.

b. The facility reasonably determines that the presence of a particular visitor would endanger the health or safety of a patient, a member of the health facility staff, or other visitor to the health facility, or would significantly disrupt the operations of the facility.

Got that?

You have a right to X, unless X is not allowed, and then you don’t have a right to it.

You have a right to this, unless it is decided that you do not have a right to it.