Category: Procedures & Services

Calgary doctor who won’t prescribe birth control backed by pro-life medical professionals

 LifeSite News

Pete Balinski

CALGARY, Alberta — After a doctor received national flak for refusing to prescribe contraception in a Calgary walk-in clinic, an Alberta pharmacist and a British Columbia doctor have risen to her defense.

“I commend her on her stance and courage,” clinical pharmacist Denis Nawrocki, a member of Pharmacists for Life International, told LifeSiteNews. “She has every professional right to exercise her conscience and keep to her convictions. Congratulations are in order.”

The story broke last week that Dr. Chantal Barry of the Westglen Medical Centre in Calgary does not prescribe ‘the pill’ after one irate woman posted to her Facebook account a picture of a sign on the facility’s front desk.

“Please be informed that the physician on duty today will not prescribe the birth control pill,” the sign reads.

“I was shocked and outraged,” Joan Chand’oiseau, 45, who posted the picture to Facebook, told Postmedia News. “I don’t think her belief system should have any part in my reproductive health.” . . . [Full text]

Should doctors have the right to refuse to prescribe birth control because of their religious beliefs?

CBC Radio

Day 6

Last week Joan Chand’oiseau was outraged to learn that the physician at her Calgary walk-in clinic refused to prescribe birth control because of her religious beliefs. Chand’oiseau’s story broke just after Canada’s largest medical regulator – The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario – announced it would be revisiting its policies on physicians and the Human Rights Code.  We check in with Joan Chand’oiseau, and invite  Margaret Somerville, Director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, and Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, to debate whether doctors should have the right to refuse to treat a patient on religious or moral grounds.

Listen

 

BMA reiterates opposition to assisted dying

The BMA has reiterated its firm opposition to legalising assisted dying in the face of renewed calls for a change in the law.

An editorial in the BMJ today calls for the Assisted Dying Bill championed by Lord Falconer to become law.

BMJ editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee, UK editor Tony Delamothe and patient editor Rosamund Snow argue that people should be able to exercise choice over their lives, which should include how and when they die.

They write: ‘Ultimately, however, this is a matter for Parliament, not doctors, to decide. Let us hope that our timid lawmakers will rise to the challenge.’

The BMJ is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BMA but has editorial independence.

BMA council chair Mark Porter acknowledged there were strongly held views within the medical profession on both sides of the assisted-dying debate.

But he insisted: ‘The BMA remains firmly opposed to legalising assisted dying. This issue has been regularly debated at the BMA’s policy-forming annual conference and recent calls for a change in the law have persistently been rejected.’ . . . [Full text]

Hobby Lobby Case and What It Says About Corporations With a Conscience

 If people want to deny corporations a conscience, how can they ever again demand that corporations act morally, conscientiously?

Paul De Vries*

The Supreme Court was right to allow corporations to be exempt from the mandate to pay for abortion pills or contraception when their leaders have established religious reasons against them. Moral issues can stand as questions for the liberty of conscience – whether individual conscience or corporate conscience.

That liberty of conscience empowers individuals, religious institutions, and corporations – as the Supreme Court just now made clear on the last day of June! The protections of the liberty of conscience for years have allowed people with a track record of pacifism to be exempt from military service and also for hospital nurses and doctors who object to abortion to be scheduled for other surgeries only. “Conscientious objectors” have had a long, distinguished, respected, empowered history in America.

Oddly, those who attack a corporate right to choose allege that it is obvious that corporations do not have consciences – and so that they cannot be “conscientious objectors.” How are those attackers so blind?  [Full text]

CMA doctors hail Supreme Court mandate ruling, decry ongoing targeting of faith community

News release

Christian Medical Association

Washington, DC – June 30, 2014 – The 15,000-member Christian Medical Association (CMA, www.cmda.org), the nation’s largest and oldest faith-based doctors’ organization, today praised the Supreme Court’s ruling in two Health and Human Services (HHS) Obamacare mandate cases but noted “increasing attempts by the government to coerce the faith community.” CMA had outlined the medical aspects underlying religious objections to the HHS Obamacare mandate in its friend of the court brief in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius.

CMA CEO Dr. David Stevens said in a statement, “We are very thankful that the Supreme Court acted to protect family businesses from government coercion and fines for simply honoring the tenets of their faith.

“This is a much-needed victory for faith freedoms, because this administration continues its assault on the values of the faith community. We are witnessing increasing attempts by the government to coerce the faith community to adopt the government’s viewpoint in matters of conscience,” noted Stevens.

CMA also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in another Supreme Court case this term, McCullen v. Coakley, to defend First Amendment free speech and assembly rights of pro-life advocates against a Massachusetts law that prohibited many citizens from entering a public street or sidewalk within 35 feet of an abortion facility.

“There seems to be growing intolerance of the faith community by some government officials who appear to want to extinguish the First Amendment freedoms that allow for a diversity of values,” Stevens observed, “We are seeing this antagonism expressed in coercive government mandates enforced with harsh penalties and discriminatory practices that threaten to eliminate the faith community from the public square.”

Dr. Stevens noted that the Obama administration recently launched another sweeping mandate that appears to target faith-based groups, requiring agreement with same-sex marriage as a condition of receiving federal grants. CMA’s Freedom2Care website (www.Freedom2Care.org) details other violations of faith and conscience rights: