Category: Religion

Catholics urged to stand up for docs’ rights

 London Free Press

Jonathan Sher

A Roman Catholic cardinal is asking church members to fight a potential change that would discipline Ontario doctors who won’t provide birth control or refer patients for an abortion.

Thomas Cardinal Collins wrote earlier this month to the province’s Catholic bishops, who in turn enlisted their priests and parishioners.

“Trying to force doctors to act against their conscience would have terrible consequences for all of us,” Bishop Ronald Fabbro, of the Diocese of London, wrote to priests.

Until now, the regulatory college that disciplines doctors left it to them to decide when to withhold treatment or referrals that offended their religious or moral beliefs. [Full text]

COLF urges Catholics to speak up for physicians’ conscience rights

The Catholic Register

Deborah Gyapong

OTTAWA – The Canadian Organization for Life and Family (COLF) is urging Catholics to “speak up” as the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons reviews is policy on conscience rights.

“In 2008, a similar policy review by the College very nearly resulted in a serious threat to conscience rights within the practice of medicine in Ontario,” COLF warned. Public input has been welcomed, COLF said, encouraging people insist the college protect conscience rights.

“No physician should be forced to act against his or her conscience by providing health care services (for example: contraception, abortion, sterilization, etc.) contrary to their moral and religious beliefs,” COLF said. [Full text]

Ontario conscience debate is about forcing out Catholic doctors

Lifesite News

Lea Singh

Let’s be honest: The current pressure on the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to change their human rights guidelines is all about forcing faithful Catholics out of the public square.

The media debate has focused on three Ottawa doctors who refuse to prescribe birth control pills, and guess what? All three of these doctors happen to be Catholic. The media hasn’t mentioned this fact, but there it is. Is it really surprising? Who else other than Catholics would refuse these days, on grounds of conscience or religious freedom, to prescribe birth control pills?

The Catholic Church consistently teaches that birth control pills (and other artificial birth control methods, including vasectomies) are morally wrong. Still, just a very small minority of Catholic doctors follow their faith to the extent of limiting their medical practice. For instance in Ottawa, a city with 870,000 inhabitants and hundreds of doctors, the media has reported only three such needles in the haystack. . . [Full Text]

Bishop expresses concern for freedom of conscience

Bishop Leahy warns against “emptying religious freedom of any meaningful content” in the name of “tolerance or equality”

Catholic Ireland

Sarah MacDonald

The State must respect freedom of conscience, the Bishop of Limerick, Dr. Brendan Leahy, said in an address on religious freedom delivered in Limerick last night.

He warned that religious freedom and conscience were being “effectively” marginalised from the public square by “tendencies that would interpret religious freedom in a narrow sense.”


‘The Meaning of Religious Freedom’

The Bishop of Limerick warned against “emptying religious freedom of any meaningful content” in the name of “tolerance or equality”.

He urged religious believers to speak up.

“In the contemporary socio-cultural climate, when a vision of life inspired by faith can subtly but effectively be deemed not PC, it is important for us to recognise the public role of religion and not be afraid to speak up,” he said. . . [Full text]

Doctors’ conscience rights under attack in birth control debate

One physician threatens to give up his practice rather than kill patients

BC Catholic

Deborah Gyapong

Doctors who refuse to prescribe birth control pills have become the focus of a debate over physicians’ rights to freedom of conscience and religion when practising medicine.

An Alberta doctor has been in the media spotlight recently for posting a notice at the clinic where she works she will not prescribe the pill and now faces a human rights complaint. Earlier this year, three Ottawa doctors came under fire for similar reasons. The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPSO) is doing a public consultation on its guidelines that could be revamped to restrict doctors’ rights to abstain from legal medical practices on religious or conscientious grounds.

For Dr. Howie Bright, past president of the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Societies (CFCPS), the attack on birth control is a “fairly discrete target because it sounds weird that a modern doctor” would not prescribe contraception and is likely to “generate reaction.” [Full text]