The Life Issues Institute reports that ads are being run on Facebook in the United Kingdom that offer women assistance in finding nearby abortion facilities, including late-term abortion specialists. The ads demonstrate that there is no need to force objecting health care workers to facilitate abortion by referral or by providing abortionist contact information, as access to abortion can be easily facilitated by popular social media and websites.
Category: Publications
Protection of Conscience Project publications
“Normalisation of cruelty” and the ‘ethics of the profession’
A court in the United Kingdom has awarded £410,000 ($663,000) in damages to 38 plaintiff families for an extraordinary cataloque of neglect, abandonment and abuse at the National Health Service’s Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, England. The incidents occurred between 2002 and 2009. Britain’s Health Secretary said that the case illustrates “the normailisation of cruelty.” One elderly patient was left unwashed for 11 weeks and another was starved to death. [RTE Question More; The Telegraph]
World Medical Association and unethical “participation”
Those who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to facilitate morally contested procedures by referral or other indirect means should take note of the World Medical Association’s reaffirmation of its position against physician “participation” in executions, which now includes a statement that physicians must not facilitate executions by importing drugs for executions. Similarly, the British group, Reprieve, has embarked upon a campaign to have drug companies sign a Pharmaceutical Hippocratic Oath against the use of their products in executions. [Bioedge]
Polish law and conduct of Polish physicians, clergy, activists and authorities leads to adverse judgement
The European Court of Human Rights has issued a judgement adverse to freedom of conscience and ordered Poland to pay two complainants, a mother and daughter, a total of 61,000 Euros in damages and costs. Subject to the possibility that the English translation of the judgement is faulty, the use of the term “anti-choice activist” by the judges brings their impartiality into question. However, the facts of the case outlined in the judgement suggest that the conduct of Polish health care personnel, anti-abortion activists, clergy and state authorities effectively guaranteed an adverse outcome.
A 14 year old girl, P. supported by her mother, S., sought an abortion for a pregnancy alleged to have been the result of a rape. While she obtained the necessary prosecutor’s certificate for the procedure, mother and daughter received contradictory information from two public hospitals in Lublin. Further, health care personnel clearly violated principles of patient confidentiality and informed consent in an effort to dissuade the girl from having an abortion. These violations included clearly coercive and manipulative tactics. P and S experienced
- the intervention of a priest and anti-abortion activists, unsolicited and unwanted,
- importuning by anti-abortion activists that included confrontations in public,
- national media attention, including a press release issued by a hospital concerning P,
- detention and six hours of questioning by the police,
- apprehension of the girl by state authorities, apparently for the express purpose of preventing the abortion,
- posting on internet by the Catholic News Agency of the girl’s travel to Gdansk for an abortion,
- the filing of criminal charges against the girl for having had unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor (i.e., the rape that resulted in pregnancy)
While the court found that objecting physicians had a legal obligation to refer patients for abortion, the source of that legal obligation was Polish law. Article 39 of Poland’s Doctor and Dentist Professions Act imposes a legal obligation of referral. The imposition is objectionable in principle, but the European Court of Human Rights can hardly be criticized for applying Polish law to Polish citizens.
General Medical Council guideline criticized by Protection of Conscience Project
Unfair to impose “long-discredited policies of forced conversion and exclusion”
NEWS RELEASE
The Protection of Conscience Project has expressed concern that the state physician regulator in the United Kingdom intends to prosecute those who refuse to convert to the religious, moral or ethical systems it approves. If actual conversion is not required, it appears that by forcing physicians to do what they believe to be wrong as a condition of practising medicine, the regulator “may simply be resurrecting the Test Act in modern professional dress.”
The criticisms appear in a Protection of Conscience Project submission to the General Medical Council (GMC) of the United Kingdom in response to the draft GMC guideline Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice. The Project comments that “it would be unfair to impose on physicians long-discredited policies of forced conversion and exclusion that would be plainly unacceptable to other professions and to the people of the United Kingdom as a whole.”
The Project submission points out that it would be hypocritical for the GMC to discipline objecting physicians who refuse to refer for morally contested treatments, since they act on the same principles applied by the GMC in its policies on organ trafficking and assisted suicide. Strong exception is taken to the suggestion that physicians act like bigots if they refuse to facilitate adultery, premarital sex, and morally contested services like the mutilation or amputation of healthy body parts or the killing of human embryos or fetuses.
In other respects, the Project expressed qualified agreement with the provisions of Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice and identified parts of the guideline requiring clarification. Specifically, physicians
- should do their best to notify patients and employers in advance of treatments to which they object for reasons of conscience, though they cannot be expected to anticipate every possible conflict;
- should not refuse to provide treatment or care to a patient on the grounds that she has had a previous morally contested treatment;
- must be prepared to treat “the health consequences of lifestyle choices” with which they disagree or to which they object (though not to provide morally contested treatments);
- should disclose beliefs only when the disclosure is solicited by a patient, or when it is reasonable to believe that it would be welcomed by the patient;
- should limit discussion of beliefs to what is relevant to the patient’s care and treatment, taking into account the importance of dialogue that is responsive to the needs of the patient.
The Project cautioned the GMC that physicians should not be discplined or criticized for a conversation naturally arising from the disclosure of conscientious objection, since disclosure is required by its guidelines. It also warned that an adverse emotional response by a patient is not necessarily evidence of professional misconduct.