Category: Law

Abortion Is No Longer a Crime in Mexico. But Will Doctors Object?

Another battle looms over whether public hospitals will be required to offer the procedure.

New York Times

Natalie Kitroeff, Oscar Lopez

MEXICO CITY — As soon as the nurse found out that she had an abortion at home, Fernanda García knew she was in danger. The nurse began yelling that she was a criminal, that what she had done was wrong, that she would be sent to jail. . . .

Now, Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that abortion is not a crime, setting a national precedent that puts the country on the path to becoming the most populous nation in Latin America to allow the procedure. Thousands of people have faced criminal investigations in recent years for ending their pregnancies, and the court’s unanimous decision last week should enable them to get any charges dropped, legal experts said. . . continue reading

Covid vaccination and the common good

Eternity

Patrick Parkinson

Covid vaccination and the common good

A couple of decades ago, there were hardly any anti-vaxxers in Australia. Those who held the belief that it was wrong to prevent illness by receiving a vaccine typically rejected other aspects of modern life and government regulation as well.

The anti-vaxxer movement gathered pace with the publication of an article in a medical journal, since retracted and thoroughly discredited, that purported to make a link between vaccination and autism.

Since then the movement has become widespread. Now, vaccination against Covid has emerged as a religious issue – at least in some theologically conservative circles. . . continue reading

HHS Denies Conscience Freedom for Physicians

National Review

Matt Bowman

We’ve all read about how President Biden recently ordered his Health and Human Services Department to issue a national eviction-moratorium mandate, even though “the bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” And indeed, the Supreme Court has just struck it down.

What can you do when the president brazenly admits that he is trampling on constitutionally protected freedoms?

But the eviction moratorium is not the only mandate from this president that far exceeds his authority. It’s not even the only illegal mandate from President Biden’s HHS.

On August 26, two organizations of medical doctors and an obstetrician/gynecologist filed a lawsuit in federal court over a mandate from President Biden and HHS that will force doctors to perform gender-transition procedures, even on children.

The administration’s excuse for this mandate is Obamacare, but that 1,000-page statute . . . simply prohibits sex discrimination, as Congress understood that term when it enacted civil-rights laws half a century ago.

Yet on January 20, President Biden ordered his federal agencies to go far beyond the law and reinterpret sex discrimination to include “gender identity” discrimination. . . . continue reading

Bill Undermines Conscientious Objection to VAD

CQ Today

Duncan Evans

Conscientious objection to voluntary assisted dying (VAD) may not be an option for Queenslanders if the state government’s bill to legalise VAD is passed in its present form, a leading healthcare provider has warned.

In a media statement released last week, Mater Board Chair Francis Sullivan AO said the proposed legislation would force Mater to allow assisted dying to take place at its facilities in direct contradiction to the moral ethos upon which the healthcare provider delivers patient care to Queenslanders.

“The proposed law will also compel Mater and other not-for-profit providers to allow doctors who are not known to our hospitals to enter our facilities to administer lethal doses to our patients,” Mr Sullivan said. . . . continue reading

The University of Manitoba’s repulsive pantomime of justice against a conservative student

The National Post

Colby Cosh

Today’s column has to start with a tip of the cap to my colleague Tyler Dawson, who has delivered a fine account of an extraordinary Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench case that was decided last week. It concerns a struggle between medical student Rafael Zaki and the University of Manitoba’s Max Rady College of Medicine, which expelled Zaki in the summer of 2020 after about a year’s worth of disciplinary procedures.

Zaki’s offence was a total of three Facebook posts that attracted anonymous complaints from 18 fellow students: two were written in support of the right to bear arms, and the third was an extended, uncompromising anti-abortion monologue that seems to have touched on just about every pro-life argument ever devised, irrespective of consistency or convincingness. . . continue reading