Category: Repression of Conscience

Pro-life doctor who refused abortion to be sacked

 Polskie Radio

Warsaw’s mayor has announced that Prof. Chazan’s contract will be “terminated in accordance with the law,” after he refused a termination to a woman carrying a foetus with severe defects.

Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz announced on Wednesday the findings of a report into the Roman Catholic doctor’s activities at the Holy Family hospital in the Polish capital, after Chazan, who is director at the hospital, refused the woman an abortion – citing a ‘conscience clause’ – but then declined to refer the woman to another hospital or physician. [Full text]

Polish conscience tested: the case of Professor Chazan

LifeSite News

Natalia Dueholm

WARSAW, Poland — The most recent case in Poland’s abortion wars will test the country’s conscience.

The case centers around Professor Bogdan Chazan, one of Poland’s top doctors and director of the Holy Family Hospital in Warsaw (Szpital im. Świętej Rodziny).  Chazan came under fire last month when he refused to perform an abortion on a deformed baby who had been conceived in vitro in a fertility clinic.  Instead of an abortion, Chazan offered medical advice for the mother, hospital care before, during, and after the pregnancy, and perinatal hospice care for the child.

Although Polish law permits abortion of sick babies until viability, it does not create the right to an abortion. It merely decriminalizes abortion for the doctor and the mother.  This particular pregnancy did not pose a danger to the woman’s health. Also, according to Polish law, any physician can invoke the country’s conscience clause, which ensures that no doctor or medical professional will ever be required to perform, or participate in, an abortion.  Nonetheless, Chazan’s hospital was fined 70,000 zloty (approximately $23,000) for his refusal. [Full text]

MaterCare International stands firmly behind Dr. Bogdan Chazan

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

MATERCARE INTERNATIONAL

MEDIA RELEASE

June 12, 2014- MaterCare International stands firmly behind Dr. Bogdan Chazan, who is being told by the Polish Prime Minister to put the laws of the nation state above his Catholic faith.

Dr. Bogdan Chazan, a distinguished and celebrated obstetrician in Warsaw, has denied a request to abort an unborn child diagnosed with serious brain defects. An openly Catholic obstetrician, Dr. Chazan previously signed a “Declaration of Faith”, along with approximately 3,000 other physicians, which calls for the recognition of a Roman Catholic doctor’s rights to perform their duties in line with their religious convictions. Dr. Chazan argued that an abortion is against his faith and has come under siege from the Polish government and has been the victim of hateful attacks from fringe groups who oppose his rights as a Roman Catholic doctor.

Poland, a predominantly Catholic country, has remained in favour of positive alternatives to abortion for decades. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a statement on Tuesday, reducing doctors to servants of the nation state, “Regardless of what his conscience is telling him [the doctor] must carry out the law.”

MaterCare International’s Executive Director Dr. Robert Walley commented, ““The simple fact is that the majority of people who have ever lived, and quite probably a large majority of people today, see abortion as the execution of an innocent life. Demanding that citizens abandon their morality and conduct executions at the command of the government is the hallmark of the most totalitarian and sinister states in human history. We are saddened and outraged that with this measure against Professor Chazan, Poland seems intent on joining their ranks.”

Walley continued, “People of faith become doctors, because they want to help people. They want to offer healing and hope, not death and despair. We look to them to give us their best advice and opinions. If we say doctors cannot have opinions, that patients are allowed to dictate their wants to a physician, then what good is a doctor? Whether or not to do anything is a moral decision, and to point the finger at those with religious backgrounds is prejudice. We should value their morality and not punish them for it. Dr. Bogdan Chazan, like Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others, equates this ‘procedure’ with murder, being forced by the law to commit murder is something we can all surely reject.”

Through his decades of service, Dr. Chazan, as a physician and professor of gynecology and obstetrics, has gained the respect of colleagues, his fellow staff, and his patients. He is a graduate of the Medical Academy in Warsaw. Previuosly, he worked as a professor at the National Research Institute of Mother and Child and was the national consultant in obstetrics and gynecology. Since 2004 he has served as a director of the Holy Family Hospital in Warsaw.

Since 1994, Dr. Bogdan Chazan he has been a member of the Government Population Commission and a member of the Committee of the Demography of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He continues to work as a strong proponent of natural family planning and Naprotechnology in Poland. He was nominated twice, in 2010 and 2012 for the award “Totus” for “courageous and consistent activities for the benefit of the civilization of life in the spirit of St. John Paul II’s teaching”. He is the chairman of the Council of MaterCare International and director of MaterCare Poland.

-Dr. Robert Walley, Executive Director of MaterCare International

MaterCare International is an organization of Catholic health professionals dedicated to the care of mothers and babies, both born and unborn, through new initiatives of service, training, research and education. www.MaterCare.org

Email: info@matercare.org Ph: 1-888-579-6472

https://www.facebook.com/matercare

Polish Prime Minister says doctors must do abortions despite conscience objection

Lifesite News

Thaddeus Balinski

WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s prime minister has declared that doctors’ opposition to abortion does not give them the right to refuse to kill a child in the womb, even under Poland’s strict abortion rules.

“Regardless of what his conscience is telling him, [a doctor] must carry out the law,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a June 10 statement, according to Polskie Radio.

“Every patient must be sure that … the doctor will perform all procedures in accordance with the law and in accordance with his duties,” Tusk said.

Poland’s laws only permit abortion if a woman’s life or health is jeopardized by the continuation of a pregnancy, if the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act such as rape, or if the unborn child is seriously malformed. The abortion must be carried out in the first 25 weeks of the pregnancy.

According to Polish law on conscience rights, doctors may still decline such abortions, but they are obliged to refer patients elsewhere.

Tusk’s statement came following the decision by obstetrician Bogdan Chazan, director of Holy Family Children’s Hospital in Warsaw, to refuse to grant an abortion to a woman who alleged that the child she was carrying had severe brain damage. . . [Full text]

Doctors who oppose morning-after pill on conscience grounds face qualifications bar

Guidelines confirm that doctors and nurses who oppose controversial emergency contraception on ‘moral or religious’ grounds cannot receive key specialist qualifications

The Telegraph

John Bingham

Doctors and nurses who object to providing controversial emergency contraception on moral or religious grounds are being barred from specialist professional qualifications under official guidelines.

They class Roman Catholics and others motivated by pro-life beliefs as “ineligible” for important qualifications provided by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) even if they complete the training programme.

It led to accusations that the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, a branch of the RCOG, is unfairly discriminating against medical staff who act on grounds of conscience. [Full Text]