The Catholic Register
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]