Protection of Conscience Project News
Service, not Servitude
Let’s start the New Year with a conundrum as old as the Republic:
When religious convictions clash with secular laws, how far should government go to accommodate religious claims of conscience? . . .In 2013, religious objections to government laws and regulations will once again provoke vigorous public debate, countless court challenges and really tough decisions over whether and when government should accommodate religious claims of conscience. [Read on]
The Irish Times
27 December, 2012
The Catholic archbishops of Armagh, Dublin, Cashel and Emly, and Tuam released a public statement on December 18th that included this general principle: “No one has the right to force or coerce someone to act against their conscience. Respect for this right is the very foundation of a free, civilised and democratic society.”
I do not think they believe that. Nor do I.
Conscience could mean many things but it is usually understood as referring to the judgment of an individual about significant moral and religious matters. Unfortunately it is possible for someone to decide in “their conscience” that politically-motivated murder is acceptable in some circumstances, and the archbishops presumably do not mean the conscience of a murderer obliges a democratic state not to interfere in their behaviour, no matter how well-intentioned it may be. . . [Read on]
Eva Kor will never forget the day her childhood ended. The images of that day, and the weeks after, are burned into her memory, as brutally permanent as the tattoo on her left forearm.
On a spring day in 1944 Kor and her twin sister Miriam, 10 years old at the time, were taken from their family and herded into the Auschwitz concentration camp. The twins became part of a group of children used for human experimentation by Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death. . . [Read more]
Lawyer Julie Kay, who won a judgement at the European Court of Human Rights against Ireland’s ban on abortion, argues that restrictions on abortion related to the life or health of the mother are unacceptable. “There are,” she writes, “no guidelines for doctors on the distinction between a medical procedure necessary to preserve a woman’s life versus a procedure that would merely protect her health.” She describes this distinction as “bogus.” [Slate]
Obstetrician Lisa Harris, whose column in the New England Journal of Medicine asserted that protection of conscience laws fail to recognize that abortion providers are motivated by conscientious convictions, repeated her arguments in an interview with the New Scientist magazine. While she admitted that the circumstances of the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland are not clear, she speculated that the Halappanavar might not have died had an abortion been provided. She stated that similar problems arise in denominational hospitals in the United States. She described the case of a woman who was referred to her with a “septic abortion ” because the foetus was still alive, and the religiously affilicated hospital where she was first treated would not induce an abortion. [New Scientist]