Protection of Conscience Project News
Service, not Servitude
Irish Independent
Just 126 of the 253 GPs who have thus far signed up to provide medical abortions are allowing their names to be released to women who ring up the ‘My Options’ freephone information line.
If a GP allows their name to be released as part of the information line directory it means that women inquiring about abortion may be able to choose who is the most . . . Full Text
The Coast
It’s been 958 days since Bill C-14 passed federal legislation, yet Nova Scotia still lacks a program for medical assistance in dying—MAiD—as well as MAiD policy and regulation.
Without policy, physicians and nurse practitioners have no way of governing MAiD, creating a series of loopholes and lack of general knowledge surrounding the subject. The Nova Scotia Health Authority, meanwhile, has published false information on its website and staff at St. Martha’s hospital in Antigonish still refuse to perform the assistance at all.
Dalhousie professor Jocelyn Downie has been investigating the legal aspects of this for quite some time, and held an open lecture last week in Halifax to present her information. . . [Full text]
Medical Xpress / The Conversation
Vaccine resistance is one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019, according to the World Health Organization. Here in the U.S., New York City is currently experiencing its worst outbreak of measles in decades, sickening scores of children in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods.
Other clustered outbreaks of deadly and highly contagious, but vaccine-preventable, diseases are becoming frustratingly routine around the country. These outbreaks are caused by some parents’ decision to claim religious and philosophical exemptions to state mandates that children must be vaccinated in order to attend school.
In response, prominent health organizations and advocacy groups have called on state legislatures to eliminate religious and philosophical exemptions. . . .
. . . In a collaboration among legal scholars and public health experts, we have developed an alternative approach: a model law that aims to reduce the number of parents who decline to vaccinate their children while respecting freedom of conscience. . . [Full text]
The Irish Catholic
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,” Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch tells his daughter in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a powerful statement, and one worth bearing in mind by those who’d seek to make an idol of the ballot box.
It also homes in on one of the key issues facing doctors, religious or otherwise, who believe that they have duties towards all human beings, born or unborn, regardless of how the 36th Amendment to the Constitution permits the State to regulate abortion by law. . .[Full text]
Irish Catholic
Ireland’s reliance on Muslim doctors in hospitals around the country may derail Government plans to roll out a national abortion service, a leading obstetrician has said.
Large numbers of non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs) working in maternity units outside Dublin are Muslims from abroad, according to Dr Trevor Hayes of Kilkenny’s St Luke’s Hospital, who says he had been personally told that they have serious religious qualms about performing abortions. . .[Full text]