Category: Procedures & Services

Lynched, fined, and dismissed: an interview with Poland’s Dr. Bogdan Chazan

LifeSite News

Natalia Duholm

Earlier this month, Dr. Bogdan Chazan, a renowned pro-life doctor in Poland and head of the gynecology and obstetrics department at Holy Family Hospital, was sacked and fined after he refused to participate in abortion. He spoke with LifeSiteNews about his ordeal. (See bottom for background on his case.)

Dr. Chazan, you were lynched by the media, your hospital was fined, and you were dismissed as hospital director.  Does it often happen that doctors in Poland are punished as severely as you were?

Not very often.  I’d even say very rarely.  Generally, with people like me, things are dealt with in a quiet way.  For example, more often, big corporations do not hire gynecologists who do not prescribe birth control. Nobody openly talks about the use of the “conscientious objection.”  Things are hushed up, with no paper trail.

For instance, I know about a case where a well-known pro-life woman was denied a post-doctoral track.  Recently, one of the candidates for director of the gynecology department at the Medical University was asked if he had signed the Declaration of Faith/Conscience (Editor’s note: This was an open letter signed by thousands of doctors in Poland; among other things, it voiced opposition to abortion.).  He admitted he had, and did not get the job.  Perhaps, there were other circumstances, too, but I don’t know. [Full text]

Medical aid in dying: Court challenge

News Release

Living with Dignity, Physicians’ Alliance

MONTREAL, July 17, 2014 /CNW Telbec/ – As announced when Bill 52, An Act Respecting End-of-Life Care, was adopted, the citizen movement Living with Dignity (LWD) and the Physicians’ Alliance against Euthanasia (the Alliance), representing together over 650 physicians and 17,000 citizens, have today filed a lawsuit before the Superior Court of Quebec in the District of Montreal.

The lawsuit requests that the Court declare invalid all the provisions of An Act Respecting End-of-Life Care that deal with “medical aid in dying”, a euphemism used to describe euthanasia. This Act not only allows certain patients to demand that a physician provoke their death, but also grants physicians the right to cause the death of these patients by the administration of a lethal substance.

The Alliance and LWD are challenging the constitutionality of those provisions in the Act which are aimed at decriminalizing euthanasia under the euphemism “medical aid in dying”. Euthanasia constitutes a culpable homicide under the Criminal Code. It is a subject-matter which is at the core of the exclusive federal legislative power in relation to criminal law and Quebec therefore does not have the power to adopt these provisions.

In addition, the impugned provisions unjustifiably infringe the rights to life and to security of patients guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. They further infringe the right to the safeguard of the dignity of the person, which is also protected by the Quebec Charter.

In view of the gravity of the situation and the urgent need to protect all vulnerable persons in Quebec, the Alliance and LWD request an accelerated management of the case in order to obtain a judgement before the expected coming into force of the Act on December 10, 2015.

Sources: The citizen network Living with Dignity and the Physicians’ Alliance against euthanasia .

Navy nurse refuses to force-feed Guantánamo captive

Detainee’s lawyer says her client described the Navy medical officer’s refusal as an act of conscientious objection.

Miami Herald

Carol Rosenberg

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

“There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty. . . [Full Text]

One Conscientious Objector at Gitmo Is Great – But It’s Not Enough

Vice News

Natasha Lennard

The international medical community has long maintained an ethical line against force-feeding. As infectious disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz has written, “Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients… The procedure is, in a word, barbaric.”

Yet in Guantanamo Bay, it is daily procedure for a reported 18 hunger striking detainees. Every day medical professionals watch strapped-down inmates gasp, gag, and choke with streaming eyes as rubber tubes are snaked through sensitive nasal passages into empty stomachs. Despite urging from institutions including the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, Gitmo prison medical staff continue to participate, all of them just following orders. All but one. [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]