British Columbia’s physician regulator has cleared a doctor of any wrongdoing for sneaking into an Orthodox Jewish nursing home that forbids assisted death and ending the life of a resident who wanted to die in his own bed.
In a letter dated July 5, 2019, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) dismissed an official complaint against Ellen Wiebe, saying the Vancouver doctor did not break any of the regulator’s rules when she helped Barry Hyman, 83, die inside the Louis Brier Home and Hospital. . . [Full text]
Since 1971 in NSW, it has been lawful to terminate a pregnancy where an honest belief is held that the procedure is “necessary to preserve the women involved from serious danger to their life, or physical or mental health.”
This Bill provides that the termination of any pregnancy up to 22 weeks will be permitted without restriction.
After 22 weeks, the Bill proposes that pregnancies may be terminated subject to certain conditions taking into account the woman’s “current and future physical, psychological and social circumstances.”
Freedom of Conscience and Religion
One part of the Bill which has not attracted much attention is the impact it has on the freedom of conscience and freedom of religion of registered health professionals.
In NSW, no referral is required to obtain a termination of pregnancy and information on the availability of such services is widely available on the internet.
Despite these facts, the Bill imposes a referral obligation on all registered health professionals who have a conscientious objection to disclose their conscientious objection to a person who asks them about those matters.
They must then refer the person or transfer their care to another health professional who they believe can provide the service and does not have a conscientious objection. In this way the Bill requires registered health professionals – which is a very broad group of people – who have a conscientious and often religiously grounded objection to participate in the procedure at least to the extent of a referral.
This is so, whether they object to abortion at all, or to abortion after a particular stage of gestation, or for sex-selection or disability grounds.
These obligations impact on all registered health professionals with conscientious objections but they are particularly onerous for Catholic health professionals because, in that tradition, participation in abortion causes an automatic excommunication from the Church.
If the State wishes to further liberalise the law in relation to the termination of pregnancy, it should not do so at the expense of health professionals with a conscientious or religious objection to participating in the procedure.
A Japanese stem cell scientist has obtained permission to create human-animal chimeras and transplant them into surrogate animals. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a researcher at the University of Tokyo and at Stanford University, plans to insert induced pluripotent human cells into mouse embryos. His ultimate aim is to grow human organs in animals. . . [Full text]
In a stunning example of evading ethical controversy by exporting it, Spanish and American researchers have created monkey-human chimeras in China. The hybrid embryos will be destroyed after they develop a central nervous system and will not be brought to term. . . [Full text]
When Adriana Ávila Barraza was 12 weeks pregnant, she received some upsetting news.
Her foetus’s head was malformed, and the prognosis was not good, her doctor told her. The diagnosis was confirmed by an x-ray when she was 16 weeks pregnant – part of the skull was missing, so the brain could not develop. The foetus would not survive. . . [Full text]