Category: Ethics

Abortion row child dies

 Polski Radio

The baby at the centre of a pro-life row that has divided Poles died on Wednesday just hours after the professor who refused to abort the child was informed he would be dismissed.

Marcin Dubienecki, lawyer of the child’s mother, confirmed that the baby – which had serious brain defects – had been born in Warsaw’s Bielanski Hospital on 30 June.

“On behalf of my client, I am passing on the information that the child ‘whose life was saved’ by Professor Chazan died at 8.35 pm [on Wednesday],” he told the TVN24 news channel.

“The child was in a very serious condition. “All of the arguments that the child should never have been born proved correct,” he claimed. [Full text]

Poland asks: should a doctor serve God, or patients?

Reuters

Marcin Goettig and Aneta Pomieczynska

(Reuters) – In April this year, a pregnant woman asked Professor Bogdan Chazan, director of Warsaw’s Holy Family Hospital, for an abortion because her own physician had diagnosed her unborn child with grave health problems.

Chazan sent the woman a letter saying he could not agree to an abortion in his hospital because of a “conflict of conscience,” and instead gave the woman the address of a hospice where, he said, the child could get palliative care once born.

The baby was born at a different hospital with, according to a doctor there, severe head and facial deformities and a brain that was not viable, conditions which the doctor said would result in the child’s death within a month or two. . .

. . . On Wednesday, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the mayor of the Polish capital, said she was firing Chazan from the hospital on the grounds that he did not have the right to refuse the abortion and did not inform the woman about the options for getting a termination. [Full text]

O Canada, Glorious and Free!

Canadian Healthcare Network

Reproduced with permission

Cristina Alarcon

The wrath of the media has fallen upon a handful of doctors—most recently a female Calgary practitioner—for politely informing their patients (as per College requirements) that they will not prescribe the pill.

Nevermind that there is no lack of doctors or clinics within a short distance who will comply. Ah, the politics of birth control!

The most recent attack comes from a retired ob/gyn who appears to have forgotten the lyrics of our beloved anthem (See O Canada! We must stand on guard for women’s reproductive rights).

Where is the glorious and free?

Forgotten is the reality that we live in a pluralistic, democratic society, and that true Canadian liberalism disagrees with the dogmatic view that all must think alike.

To force a doctor to act against his conscience is to open wide the doors to state-controlled medicine

Should freedom of conscience and religious belief not be protected in a liberal democracy? Should a woman’s so-called reproductive rights trump the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by our Canadian Charter (see section 2 [a]).

As well stated by blogger Brian Lilly, only a revisionist such as Trudeau Jr. would twist the words of his own father to claim that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was meant to grant women abortion rights.

But no matter what your stance on abortion, there are certain rights without which society as we know it would cease to be.

Thus, the rights of freedom of conscience and religion are inalienable and universal.

They derive from the unique dignity of the human person and constitute the bedrock on which all other human rights rest—the foundation of every truly free society.

No need to remind ourselves that the suppression of these rights contributed to the most gruesome monstrosities ever carried out by otherwise good doctors under the Nazi regime.

To his credit, the ob/gyn who wrote the O Canada piece does defend the wearing of turbans and openness to diversity. He also wisely states that if one is moral, one does not deliberately harm.

But to harm the conscience of people by forcing them to participate in something they find deplorable, even if legal, is to break the very fabric of society.

It would force doctors to kill patients if that were legal; it would force them to prescribe the newest medical fad diet pills; it would force those who (for non-religious reasons) don’t believe in pumping women with exogenous hormones to do so, no matter what the known cancer and other health risks.

And to force a doctor to act against his conscience is to open wide the doors to state-controlled medicine, reducing the professional to a well-paid, educated puppet-on-a-string.

Cristina Alarcon is a Vancouver pharmacist and writer. She holds a master’s degree in bioethics.

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]

What are the issues in post-mortem sperm retrieval?

Bioedge

Michael Cook

In 2010 21-year-old Niklas Evans was assaulted outside a bar in Texas. He ended up in a coma and died after 10 days. His heartbroken mother, Missy Evans, requested the hospital to retrieve her son’s sperm so that she could create a grandchild with a surrogate mother. The case was too controversial for American fertility clinics so she ended up travelling to South Africa.

Did Missy and her doctors act ethically in removing sperm from Niklas’s dead body without his consent? This is the question that Anna Smajdor, of the University of East Anglia, tackles in the Journal of Medical Ethics, based on a discussion of some cases which have occurred in England. Like many other bioethicists, she opposes it.

The dead still have interests. The logic of post-mortem sperm retrieval without explicit consent could be extended to many other issues,  like organ extraction, exhibition of the body, probate law and so on. Legally speaking, much more than a child is at stake.

The validity of inferred consent is a dangerous principle. “In medicine generally, consent for procedure X cannot be inferred from someone’s previous beliefs about situation Y,” she writes. If men knew what was involved in electro-ejaculation, they might well refuse their consent, even if they did express a wish to have children.

Proxy consent for one’s own benefit is a dangerous principle. She writes: 

Relatives can agree to donate a loved one’s tissue, but they cannot demand access to that tissue for themselves. The reasons for this are straightforward. Human tissues and organs are valuable commodities. This means that the bodies of dead and dying patients are vulnerable to exploitation. If the person testifying as to the patient’s wishes and providing proxy consent is alsothe one who stands to gain from the tissue that is made available, there is a clear conflict of interest.

The desire for offspring is not sufficient reason. From a woman’s ardent desire for a child one cannot infer consent. “Couples’ reproductive decisions are not necessarily based on symmetrical and equally held desires … It is risky and unjust to assume that one partner’s reproductive desires can be inferred from those of the other. And if this is the case in the living, it is still more so in the case of the dead or dying, who cannot articulate their dissent.”

Smajdor makes two specific recommendations. First, that the rules for posthumous gamete donation be tightened. Second, that the discretionary authority of the UK’s fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, be rescinded so that it cannot permit the export of gametes obtained without consent.

cclicense-some-rightsThis article is published by and BioEdge.org under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation to Bioedge. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.