New England Journal of Medicine
Perspective
Doctors dedicate themselves to helping others. But how selective can they be in deciding whom to help? Recent years have seen some highly publicized examples of doctors who reject patients not because of time constraints or limited expertise but on far more questionable grounds, including the patient’s sexual orientation, parents’ unwillingness to vaccinate (in surveys, as many as 30% of pediatricians say they have asked families to leave their practice for this reason), and most recently, the patient’s weight. [Read more . . .]
Holly Fernandez Lynch is also the author of Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise (MIT Press, 2008). There is a clear distinction between conscientious objection (which is based on a desire to avoid moral complicity in perceived wrongful conduct) and the kind of discrimination that is the subject of this article.