Category: United Kingdom

Conscience win for Christian pharmacists

The Christian Institute

Christian pharmacists will remain free to do their jobs in line with their consciences after regulators published new guidance recognising the “positive” role of religion.

Earlier draft guidance by the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) could have forced Christians to provide access to abortifacient or hormone-blocking drugs.

The guidance now states: “Pharmacy professionals have the right to practise in line with their religion, personal values or beliefs”. The changes were made after The Christian Institute threatened the GPhC with legal action and hundreds of Christian professionals raised objections. . . [Full text]

 

How GPhC’s religious standards compare with doctors

Lawyer Noel Wardle explains the impact and context of the controversial standards for pharmacists

C+D

Annabelle Collins

All pharmacists will be aware of standard 3.4 in the General Pharmaceutical Council’s (GPhC) previous standards of conduct, ethics and performance – often referred to as the “conscience clause”. This clause gave pharmacists an opt-out for providing services and medicines that are contrary to their “religious and moral beliefs”.

However, the regulator adopted new standards in May – called the ‘standards for pharmacy professionals’ – and pharmacists and employers alike need to think about the implications. . . [Full text]

 

Pro-life medics being forced to choose between career or conscience

Christian Institute

Pro-life medics in the US are ‘under attack’, an academic has warned.

Author and bioethicist, Wesley J. Smith, said medics who are morally opposed to abortion and assisted suicide may soon be forced to choose between “their careers and their convictions”.

He made the comments in an article for First Things, an influential journal of religion and public life.

‘Morally opposed’

In support of his case, he highlighted work published in the New England Journal of Medicine which described abortion as “a standard obstetrical practice” and “not medically controversial”.

Smith said: “The authors take an absolutist position, claiming that personal morality has no place in medical practice.”

He went on to highlight several examples where doctors are being forced to refer patients for abortion and assisted suicide “even if they are morally opposed”. . . . [Full text]

 

New threat to nurses and midwives over abortions, warns Christian nurse

Christian Today

Ruth Gledhill

A leading Christian nurse is warning that nurses and midwives could find themselves under new pressures to be involved with abortions and other procedures that go against their conscience.

Steve Fouch, head of nursing with the the Christian Medical Fellowship Head of Nursing, warns in a blog of a  challenge to the rules that allow doctors to opt out of abortions.

He is writing after a new study, headlined ‘Vacuum aspiration for induced abortion could be safely and legally performed by nurses and midwives’,  questions the need for abortions to be carried out by doctors in the first place. . . [Full text]

New study threatens midwives’ freedom of conscience on abortion

CMF Blogs

Steve Fouch

In the latest bid to circumvent the increasing number of younger doctors being unwilling to perform abortions, a new report has challenged the need for some surgical abortions to be undertaken by doctors at all.

Sally Sheldon, a Law Professor at the University of Kent, has published a study into the 1967 Abortion Act and subsequent legal opinions to argue that in the case of vacuum aspiration (VAs), midwives or nurses should be able to carry out the procedure.

This, she argues is congruent with ‘recognition of nurse competences, follows government policy that patients should receive the right care, in the right place at the right time by appropriately trained staff, fits with guidance offered by relevant professional bodies, and offers the potential for developing more streamlined, cost-effective abortion services.’ . . . [Full text]