Month: August 2014

Freedom from conscience

The Interim

Editorial

On June 24, Joan Chand’oiseau saw a sign at the front desk of the Westglen Medical Centre in Calgary: “The physician on duty today will not prescribe the birth control pill.” The sign, put up only when Dr. Chantal Barry is the sole physician at the clinic, so offended the would-be birth-controller that she has since made the good doctor’s principled objection her casus belli for a modern-day, social-media crusade. The apparent slight against Chand’oiseau has now garnered national attention, with political candidates dutifully – if pitifully – conforming to the conventional wisdom: that some wrong has been done, and some remedy must be made. – [Full Text]

Defend Integrity

The Catholic Register

Editorial

Doctors hold a favoured place in society because they are seen as models of compassion and integrity. They are admired as healers and moral leaders, virtuous people, widely respected. If you can’t trust your doctor, who can you trust?

But there is a legitimate concern that a current undertaking by the Ontario College of Physicians could lead to erosion of that stature. The College is conducting a review of its human-rights-code policy amid some pressure to purge religious freedom and conscience rights from everyday medical practice. First step is an ongoing consulting process that is seeking professional and public input.

Here is The Register’s input: leave the current policy alone and do nothing to undermine a doctor’s autonomy to assert their Charter rights of freedom of religion and conscience. [Full Text]

I was told to approve a lethal injection, but it violates my basic medical ethics

We risk botched executions so long as they are conducted in a scientific vacuum and medical professionals operate devoid of any moral compass

The Guardian

Marc Stern

I peered through the small window of an otherwise solid steel door of the isolation wing of the prison, and saw a small man on his knees in front of his steel framed bed. He had committed many murders and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Perhaps he was praying. Perhaps he was looking for a pencil. But that’s when it struck me: There might be a punishment worse than execution.

Other than a maximum of one hour per day when he could be escorted to a recreational cage outdoors, he would spend the next 10, 20, perhaps 30 years of his life in this very room – eight feet by 10 feet. He would have little contact with other human beings aside from officers and medical professionals. Forging a new friendship or hugging a loved one, if possible at all, would be rare, supervised and not likely spontaneous. His life would be restricted to the same 80 square feet – forever. . . [Full Text]

 

Input sought on physicians’ conscience rights

The Catholic Register

Evan Boudreau

TORONTO – Silence from the public could cost Ontario’s doctors the right to deny non-emergency procedures, prescriptions and referrals which they morally oppose, warns the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) is conducting a regularly scheduled review, as it does every five years, of its internal human-rights code and is being pressured to modify the sections regarding denying services based on conscience.

“A lot of physicians feel strongly that they want these conscience rights protected,” said Moira McQueen, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute. “We have been encouraging people… to write to CPSO to say keep the policy the way it is so that physicians do not have to prescribe something that they think is morally unacceptable. It usually is about contraception and abortion … neither one of those are truly medical emergencies.” [Full Text]

Ottawa archbishop among religious urging CPSO not to violate physicians’ conscience rights

Catholic Register

Deborah Gyapong, Canadian Catholic News

OTTAWA – Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, along with an imam and a rabbi, have written a joint-intervention in favour of physicians’ conscience rights.

“No Canadian citizen, including any physician, should ever be disciplined or risk losing their professional standing for conducting their work in conformity with their most deeply held ethical or religious convictions,” wrote Prendergast, Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Imam Samy Metwally in a July 31 letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

The College had been seeking input until Aug. 5 on its policy review entitled “Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code.” [Full Text]