Category: Ethics

Fundamental freedoms

 Why the right to conscientious objection must be restored

Presentation to the Life Dinner
Melbourne, Australia

David van Gend*

I feel a little out of place coming from Queensland to speak about the wretched situation in Victoria: coming from a State where it is always sunny, where the people are always nice, and where we don’t have oppressive laws that try to compel the conscience of free citizens.

But we are all in this together: an assault on fundamental freedoms in one State will become a precedent for similar abuses in other States.

Uncivil society

It was a Melbourne man, Julian Savulescu, now an ethics professor at Oxford, who declared that doctors who will not provide abortion should be “punished through removal of license to practice”. He wrote in the British Medical Journal in 2006:

A doctors’ conscience has little place in the delivery of modern medical care. What should be provided to patients is defined by the law… If people are not prepared to offer legally permitted, efficient, and beneficial care to a patient because it conflicts with their values, they should not be doctors.1

Crucial to his argument is that, “when society has already decided that a service is legal”, it is not for doctors to “compromise the delivery of services”. When Savulescu’s article was discussed in 2006 in the medical newspaper Australian Doctor, I was given as an example of the sort of doctor who, in his view, “should either get out of the specialty or the profession altogether.”2  I gave a different angle to Australian Doctor: that abortion as commonly practiced is not a medical service; it is a “medical abuse” which doctors are bound by their Hippocratic principles and humane conscience not to commit.

And no law, no professional board, has the authority to compel any doctor to violate the principles of their vocation or mutilate their own conscience by collaborating in intentional killing.

Yet in Victoria, under section 8 of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008,3 that compulsion by the authorities is exactly what doctors and nurses face.

Not long ago society was a little more civil and did not contemplate using the force of law to compel the conscience of fellow citizens. . . [Full text]

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]

Top employment strategies for discouraging conscientious objection

Bioedge

Xavier Symons

In a recent Journal of Medical Ethics article, controversial bioethicist Francesca Minerva argues for limiting the number of conscientious objectors in Italian hospitals.

Minerva asserts that conscientious objection “prevents access to certain treatments”, and proposes that we set up disincentives for objectors in hospitals. The proposed solutions include offering higher salaries for non-objectors and establishing ‘conscientious objector quotas’. She concludes:

When conscience-related issues prevent access to a certain treatment, such as abortion in Italy, the public health system, or the Ministry of Health in this case, has to find a solution that safeguards and protects the health of the patients as a priority.

In a response to Minerva, Oxford theologian and ethicist Roger Trigg argues that conscientious objection is a necessary part of the practice of medicine:

Once we discount conscientious moral reasoning, medicine is reduced to a technical issue about procedures, without any regard to their effect on the greater human good.

In the case of abortion, he suggests that high rates of conscientious objection might indicate a need to reconsider the original policy:

One problem with abortion is that for the most part those making the political decision are not those who have to implement the policy. If the latter object in sufficiently high numbers to make the policy hard to implement, that might be a reason for assuming there could be something wrong with what was being proposed.

cclicense-some-rightsThis article is published by Xavier Symons 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.

Austrian historians studying another informed consent debacle from the 50s

Bioedge

Michael Cook

There seems to be an unending trickle of revelations from the 1950s and 1960s about the practices of doctors who still had not learned the Nuremberg Code. The latest comes from Vienna, Austria, where researchers deliberately infected hospitalised children with malaria in the hope of finding a cure for syphilis.

An historical commission began studying the issue in 2012. It appears that between 1955 and 1960 about 230 orphaned children at the Hoff Clinic, at the Vienna University Clinic for Psychiatry and Neurology, were experimented on without their consent. Afterwards the injection the children had high fevers for two weeks and for another 20 years experienced intermittent fevers. No one appears to have died from the treatment. A complete report will be submitted next year.

Malaria therapy for syphilis may sound peculiar, but in 1927, in the days before antibiotics, Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for refining the technique. He and others observed that high fevers killed the malaria parasite. This saved the patient from general paralysis and “idiocy”, but left him with fevers. However, these could be treated with quinine, so the risk seemed acceptable.

This article is published by Michael Cook 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.

Pre-signing abortion forms is illegal, General Medical Council admits

Nearly 70 doctors who were found to be pre-signing abortion forms without knowing anything about the individuals involved were breaking the law, the head of the General Medical Council admitted

The Telegraph

Miranda Prynne

More than 60 doctors who pre-signed abortion forms without knowing anything about the women concerned did break the law, the head of the General Medical Council admitted last night as pressure grew on police to investigate.

Niall Dickson, chief executive and registrar of the GMC, said the 67 physicians were acting “against the law” but insisted no patients had come to harm as a result.

He claimed the practice of pre-signing the forms had become widespread but was “unacceptable” and vowed to “bring this unlawful and unacceptable practice to an end”. . . [Full text]