Category: ChristianityCatholic

Ontario conscience debate is about forcing out Catholic doctors

Lifesite News

Lea Singh

Let’s be honest: The current pressure on the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to change their human rights guidelines is all about forcing faithful Catholics out of the public square.

The media debate has focused on three Ottawa doctors who refuse to prescribe birth control pills, and guess what? All three of these doctors happen to be Catholic. The media hasn’t mentioned this fact, but there it is. Is it really surprising? Who else other than Catholics would refuse these days, on grounds of conscience or religious freedom, to prescribe birth control pills?

The Catholic Church consistently teaches that birth control pills (and other artificial birth control methods, including vasectomies) are morally wrong. Still, just a very small minority of Catholic doctors follow their faith to the extent of limiting their medical practice. For instance in Ottawa, a city with 870,000 inhabitants and hundreds of doctors, the media has reported only three such needles in the haystack. . . [Full Text]

Bishop expresses concern for freedom of conscience

Bishop Leahy warns against “emptying religious freedom of any meaningful content” in the name of “tolerance or equality”

Catholic Ireland

Sarah MacDonald

The State must respect freedom of conscience, the Bishop of Limerick, Dr. Brendan Leahy, said in an address on religious freedom delivered in Limerick last night.

He warned that religious freedom and conscience were being “effectively” marginalised from the public square by “tendencies that would interpret religious freedom in a narrow sense.”


‘The Meaning of Religious Freedom’

The Bishop of Limerick warned against “emptying religious freedom of any meaningful content” in the name of “tolerance or equality”.

He urged religious believers to speak up.

“In the contemporary socio-cultural climate, when a vision of life inspired by faith can subtly but effectively be deemed not PC, it is important for us to recognise the public role of religion and not be afraid to speak up,” he said. . . [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]

Philippines: Church encourages conscientious objection to contraception

The country’s bishops have issued a document recalling that abortion has not been legitimized and that a person’s right to life is still inviolable

Vatican Insider | Lastampa

Paolo Affatato

Conscientious objection is the best way to defy the Reproductive health bill in December 2012 which the Supreme Court officially approved last April. After Parliament approved the controversial provision in December 2012, despite strong opposition from the Philippine Church, some Catholic politicians presented a series of appeals in a final desperate attempt to contest the constitutional legitimacy of the law. The verdict issued by the court means all provisions relating to contraception and sex education are now enforceable. The idea is to spread a culture of family planning and encourage birth control. The Philippine bishops who have been holding a plenary session in recent days, have tried to save the situation by issuing a “pastoral guide“. . .  [Full text]

Poland asks: should a doctor serve God, or patients?

Reuters

Marcin Goettig and Aneta Pomieczynska

(Reuters) – In April this year, a pregnant woman asked Professor Bogdan Chazan, director of Warsaw’s Holy Family Hospital, for an abortion because her own physician had diagnosed her unborn child with grave health problems.

Chazan sent the woman a letter saying he could not agree to an abortion in his hospital because of a “conflict of conscience,” and instead gave the woman the address of a hospice where, he said, the child could get palliative care once born.

The baby was born at a different hospital with, according to a doctor there, severe head and facial deformities and a brain that was not viable, conditions which the doctor said would result in the child’s death within a month or two. . .

. . . On Wednesday, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the mayor of the Polish capital, said she was firing Chazan from the hospital on the grounds that he did not have the right to refuse the abortion and did not inform the woman about the options for getting a termination. [Full text]