Category: Procedures & Services

If you want birth control pills, go to a different doctor

 Calgary Herald
Reproduced with permission

John Carpay

A Calgary doctor’s refusal to prescribe birth control pills has triggered demands for her ouster from the medical profession.

Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Jim Prentice has denounced the doctor’s choice to follow her conscience as inconsistent with “a doctor’s obligation in a public health-care system.” Apparently Prentice believes that a doctor should simply do and provide whatever the patient wants done and provided, regardless of the doctor’s education, training, experience, conscience, and professional judgment.

This raises some interesting questions. If a doctor, based on her experience and research, believes that liberation therapy (dilating and opening blocked neck veins) is not a good option for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, must she provide that therapy simply because the patient demands it?

What about a doctor who is convinced that anti-cholesterol pills do more harm than good? What if a doctor refuses to prescribe birth control pills because she believes, apart from any religious teaching, that they compromise women’s health? Should this physician disregard her own research, analysis and conclusions and prescribe what she considers to be a dangerous product?

Does it really matter whether the doctor’s belief is characterized as scientific, religious, metaphysical, conscientious, or something else?

Certainly a doctor’s beliefs about what is, or is not, good medicine will sometimes inconvenience a patient. But what would be the consequences of forcing doctors to abandon their professional judgment and violate their conscience in order to pander to patients’ wishes? If the government compels doctors to supply whatever patients demand, this presupposes that a patient’s knowledge, training and judgment is at least equal to that of the doctor’s. And if so, why bother with a medical profession in the first place? If individual doctors don’t have the right to reach their own conclusions as to what is good or bad, why bother to distinguish doctors from those who are not doctors?

These same questions apply to other professions and occupations. Would Jim Prentice (who is a lawyer) impose this same standard on lawyers who refuse to act for a client, or who decline to take a particular case, because the lawyer’s conscience says that doing so would be wrong? Our legal system is as public as the medical system. Why not remove from lawyers their current right to refuse to advance a cause that the lawyer believes to be unjust? Should lawyers be permitted to inconvenience prospective clients by telling them to find another lawyer? Shouldn’t clients be entitled to receive from a particular lawyer whatever services they demand?

The same question about a consumer’s supposed right to be free from inconvenience arises in other contexts. Should a Jewish or Muslim butcher be compelled to sell pork to the public, just because pork is popular? Or should the citizens of a free society exhibit tolerance and respect for the conscience of these businessmen, and suffer the inconvenience of buying pork elsewhere?

A free and democratic society allows consumers and providers to accept or decline each other’s business, without state coercion. In a free society, the government does not force doctors, lawyers, butchers and other people to do things that they do not wish to do. This is freedom, and it sometimes causes inconveniences. But freedom cannot coexist with a purported “right” of patients, clients and consumers to use government’s coercive power to obtain whatever goods or services they want, from unwilling suppliers.

People who cherish our free society understand that the inconvenience of not immediately getting what you want is part of life. We live in a society where people have all manner of differing beliefs and commitments. Part of the price we pay for freedom is that not everyone will wish to help you do what you want. You may need to find a different doctor, or another lawyer. You may need to go to a different butcher or restaurant to buy pork. People who disagree with you are people too.

If Jim Prentice respects the freedom of lawyers to decline cases and clients, he should support the right of doctors – and everyone else – to do likewise. That would be consistent with the free society of which Albertans are rightfully proud.

 

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]