Category: News

Right-to-die already weighing on Quebec’s conscience

 New law has hospitals, doctors grappling with old fears, new moral burdens

Toronto Star

Allan Woods

MONTREAL—Quebec passed a landmark euthanasia law earlier this month meant to end the agony in the final days of a terminal patient’s life. But the legislation has lumped the province’s medical community with an existential burden it is only now confronting.

Doctors are weighing their consciences against their looming legal responsibilities to dying patients. It’s not entirely clear which one will win the day.

“I’ve been working in clinical ethics as a physician for 24 years and this is going to be one of our biggest challenges,” says Dr. Eugene Bereza, director of the centre for applied ethics at Montreal’s McGill University Health Centre.

The process that led to Bill 52, the so-called Medical Aid in Dying legislation, was wrenching enough in a society where the government, school and hospitals were a proxy for the Catholic Church not two generations ago. . . . [Full text]

New Zealand Green Party will force referral for abortion for non-medical reasons

Sean Murphy*

The Green Party of New Zealand has published a position paper that includes a number of statements concerning abortion in the country.  The paper notes that the law now requires that abortion must be approved by two physicians on grounds that the procedure is necessary to preserve the woman’s mental or physical health or because of fetal disability. The party states that, since “99% of abortions are approved on ‘mental health’ grounds,” the current legal situation is ‘dishonest’.  This seems to be a frank admission that 99% of abortions are not, in fact, necessary to ensure mental or physical health.

If it forms a government, the party would decriminalize the procedure completely up to 20 weeks gestation, while continuing “current practice” beyond that point.  In addition, the position paper states that “to prevent coercion either for or against abortion,” it will:

Ensure medical oversight agencies, such as the Medical Council, maintain, publicise and enforce codes of ethics mandating that personal beliefs (including religious, political and moral) are protected, however the practitioner is required to refer the patient to a neutral practitioner in a timely manner.

Three points about this proposal are of interest.

First: it implies that a physician willing to provide an abortion is “neutral” with respect to the procedure, while a physician unwilling to do so is not.  This is incorrect.  To take a position either for or against the acceptability of abortion involves a moral or ethical judgement, just as a moral or ethical judgement is involved in stealing or refusing to steal.

Second: objecting physicians not infrequently refuse to facilitate morally contested procedures by referral because they believe that doing so makes them complicit in the act.  Demanding that they facilitate abortion by referral is not protective of their freedom of conscience or religion.

Third: if the paper is correct in asserting that  no medical grounds exist for “99%” of abortions now taking place in New Zealand,  there would seem to be no reason to compel objecting physicians to refer for the procedure.

Director of IIRF Speaks at Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice on Freedom of Expression and Conscientious Objection

Christian Post

World Evangelical Alliance

“Religion is part of one’s personality. It is not like a car so that you arbitrarily can restrict its use from time to time,” claimed Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher in a lecture in Brazil’s Supreme Court. The lectures were attended by about 400 congressmen, members of the government, government staff, representatives of public authorities, heads of Christian churches, leaders of other religions, and the leadership of the Christian legal association ANAJURE.

Schirrmacher is the Rector of Martin Bucer Seminary, including its Brazilian branch, Executive Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom, and Ambassador for Human Rights of the World Evangelical Alliance.

ANAJURE opened the First International Congress on Civil Liberties at the auditorium of the Brazilian Supreme Court with the theme “Freedom of Expression and Conscientious Objection.” The lectures were given by Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher and Dr. Jonatas Machado, Professor for Constitutional Law at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and moderated by Prof. Dr. Uziel Santana from the University of Aracaju and president of ANAJURE. . . . [Full text]

MaterCare International stands firmly behind Dr. Bogdan Chazan

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

MATERCARE INTERNATIONAL

MEDIA RELEASE

June 12, 2014- MaterCare International stands firmly behind Dr. Bogdan Chazan, who is being told by the Polish Prime Minister to put the laws of the nation state above his Catholic faith.

Dr. Bogdan Chazan, a distinguished and celebrated obstetrician in Warsaw, has denied a request to abort an unborn child diagnosed with serious brain defects. An openly Catholic obstetrician, Dr. Chazan previously signed a “Declaration of Faith”, along with approximately 3,000 other physicians, which calls for the recognition of a Roman Catholic doctor’s rights to perform their duties in line with their religious convictions. Dr. Chazan argued that an abortion is against his faith and has come under siege from the Polish government and has been the victim of hateful attacks from fringe groups who oppose his rights as a Roman Catholic doctor.

Poland, a predominantly Catholic country, has remained in favour of positive alternatives to abortion for decades. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a statement on Tuesday, reducing doctors to servants of the nation state, “Regardless of what his conscience is telling him [the doctor] must carry out the law.”

MaterCare International’s Executive Director Dr. Robert Walley commented, ““The simple fact is that the majority of people who have ever lived, and quite probably a large majority of people today, see abortion as the execution of an innocent life. Demanding that citizens abandon their morality and conduct executions at the command of the government is the hallmark of the most totalitarian and sinister states in human history. We are saddened and outraged that with this measure against Professor Chazan, Poland seems intent on joining their ranks.”

Walley continued, “People of faith become doctors, because they want to help people. They want to offer healing and hope, not death and despair. We look to them to give us their best advice and opinions. If we say doctors cannot have opinions, that patients are allowed to dictate their wants to a physician, then what good is a doctor? Whether or not to do anything is a moral decision, and to point the finger at those with religious backgrounds is prejudice. We should value their morality and not punish them for it. Dr. Bogdan Chazan, like Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others, equates this ‘procedure’ with murder, being forced by the law to commit murder is something we can all surely reject.”

Through his decades of service, Dr. Chazan, as a physician and professor of gynecology and obstetrics, has gained the respect of colleagues, his fellow staff, and his patients. He is a graduate of the Medical Academy in Warsaw. Previuosly, he worked as a professor at the National Research Institute of Mother and Child and was the national consultant in obstetrics and gynecology. Since 2004 he has served as a director of the Holy Family Hospital in Warsaw.

Since 1994, Dr. Bogdan Chazan he has been a member of the Government Population Commission and a member of the Committee of the Demography of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He continues to work as a strong proponent of natural family planning and Naprotechnology in Poland. He was nominated twice, in 2010 and 2012 for the award “Totus” for “courageous and consistent activities for the benefit of the civilization of life in the spirit of St. John Paul II’s teaching”. He is the chairman of the Council of MaterCare International and director of MaterCare Poland.

-Dr. Robert Walley, Executive Director of MaterCare International

MaterCare International is an organization of Catholic health professionals dedicated to the care of mothers and babies, both born and unborn, through new initiatives of service, training, research and education. www.MaterCare.org

Email: info@matercare.org Ph: 1-888-579-6472

https://www.facebook.com/matercare

Polish Prime Minister says doctors must do abortions despite conscience objection

Lifesite News

Thaddeus Balinski

WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s prime minister has declared that doctors’ opposition to abortion does not give them the right to refuse to kill a child in the womb, even under Poland’s strict abortion rules.

“Regardless of what his conscience is telling him, [a doctor] must carry out the law,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a June 10 statement, according to Polskie Radio.

“Every patient must be sure that … the doctor will perform all procedures in accordance with the law and in accordance with his duties,” Tusk said.

Poland’s laws only permit abortion if a woman’s life or health is jeopardized by the continuation of a pregnancy, if the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act such as rape, or if the unborn child is seriously malformed. The abortion must be carried out in the first 25 weeks of the pregnancy.

According to Polish law on conscience rights, doctors may still decline such abortions, but they are obliged to refer patients elsewhere.

Tusk’s statement came following the decision by obstetrician Bogdan Chazan, director of Holy Family Children’s Hospital in Warsaw, to refuse to grant an abortion to a woman who alleged that the child she was carrying had severe brain damage. . . [Full text]