Category: Proposed Laws

Medical Establishment Opposes Conscience Rights

Evolution News & Science Today
Reproduced with permission

Wesley J. Smith

The laws and regulations of the United States protect medical professionals from being forced to participate in abortion and sterilization and other procedures against their religious beliefs by prohibiting discrimination in employment.

The medical establishment thus responds to the creation of a new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR). How awful, they yell. We want our pro-life colleagues, and those who believe in the Hippocratic Oath, to be forced to violate their religious and moral beliefs in their professional lives.

For example, the Massachusetts Medical Society doesn’t want a division formed to protect their colleagues. From the Society’s statement:

As physicians, we have an obligation to ensure patients are treated with dignity while accessing and receiving the best possible care to meet their clinical needs. We will not and cannot, in good conscience, compromise our responsibility to heal the sick based upon a patient’s racial identification, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, disability, immigration status, or economic status.

Baloney. It won’t “compromise” anything. Doctors are not “on demand” technocrats who fill patient’s orders, particularly with regard to non-life-threatening and elective procedures, which are the real subjects here.

It could, however, protect employees from being forced by their employers to choose between their faith or moral beliefs, and their careers.

In a society as profoundly rent as ours is about fundamental moral beliefs around the sanctity of human life and the proper role of medicine in fulfilling lifestyle and other personal desires, basic comity requires such focused enforcement of legal conscience protections.

Otherwise, pro-lifers will be driven entirely out of medicine — an outcome, I assume, that the the leaders of the Massachusetts Medical Society would heartily applaud.

https://evolutionnews.org/2018/01/the-medical-establishment-opposes-conscience-rights/

British conscience protection bill: second reading set for 26 January, 2018

The Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill [HL] 2017-19, introduced by Baroness Nuala O’Loan, will be debated during second reading in the British House of Lords on 26 January, 2018.  The proposal is a procedure-specific bill limited to activities associated with abortion, artificial reproduction and withdrawing life sustaining treatment.

Doctors, advocacy groups address proposed law protecting those who object to assisted dying

CBC News

Holly Caruk

Dr. Frank Ewert wants protection from having to help a patient die — but Dying with Dignity Canada doesn’t want that to happen at the cost of patients receiving full access to end-of-life options.

“When I started back a number of years ago and vowed to follow the Hippocratic oath, I meant it. It was very profound to me, it resonated with my core beliefs, that I would always respect life, that I would do nothing to harm a patient,” Ewert told a legislative committee on Monday evening. . . [Full text]

 

Critics call bill aimed to protect health workers unwilling to offer assisted death ‘one-sided’

CBC: The Current

Interviewer/host: Piya Chattopadhyay

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Bill 34 is being introduced by the Manitoba government to protect conscience rights for health care professionals, so that health care providers would not be required to participate in assisted suicide.

VOICE 2: While I cannot participate in assisted suicide for a couple of reasons. The first is I made a vow as a medical student 40 years ago that I wouldn’t kill patients, okay? And I’m not willing to cross that line.

PC: It has been less than 18 months now since medically assisted dying became legal in Canada. And health care workers are still adapting to that paradigm change. We just heard part of a video produced by the Coalition for Health Care and Conscience. It’s a national umbrella organization of religious groups, and as you heard it is lobbying for Bill 34 a proposed piece of legislation in Manitoba that was drafted to help health care workers with conscientious objections to helping end patients’ lives. Here’s Manitoba’s health minister Kelvin Goertzen. . . [Full episode transcript]

 

 

Proposed legislation to protect health professionals who object to assisted dying called ‘one-sided’

Dying with Dignity Canada says Bill 34 doesn’t protect patients’ rights to access assisted dying

CBC news

Holly Caruk

A bill that would protect Manitoba health professionals’ rights to refuse assisted dying services and protect them from reprisals is being called redundant and one-sided.

Bill 34, which was introduced in May and hasn’t yet reached a second reading in the House, would ensure health professionals cannot be compelled to go against their own religious or ethical beliefs when it comes to providing medical assistance in dying (MAID) services.

It would also ban any professional regulatory body from requiring members to participate in medically assisted deaths, which were made legal by the Supreme Court in 2015. . . [Full text]