Service, not Servitude
The Globe and Mail
Alberta’s medical regulator is calling on the college representing Canada’s family doctors to help it boost prescribing rates of the abortion pill, saying the current poor access in the province is putting patients at risk . . .
. . . A Globe and Mail investigation on Saturday revealed that the majority of abortion-pill prescriptions across Canada are being written at abortion clinics, which are primarily located in large urban centres. . .[Full text]
Two problems with Scott Morrison’s proposed Religious Discrimination Bill. First, what does it mean for those who make a stand on conscientious, not religious, grounds? Why should our laws protect religious dissenters but not agnostic dissenters?
Second, does it effectively address the actual threats facing religious people? These are not threats to the freedom to worship but the freedom to speak one’s truth in the public square (not so, Izzy?) or educate one’s children in a faith-based school (not a ‘Safe School’) whose teachers uphold religious values.
Let me give two personal anecdotes of the overarching threat, whether to religious or irreligious people, which is the threat to free speech. Without free speech we cannot defend our deepest conscientious or religious convictions. . . {Full text]
The Black Sea
Romanian medical student Bianca was in South Korea in March this year when she discovered she was pregnant.
At the time she was taking part in a short work placement in Daegu in the south-east of the country, and was soon to return to Germany to resume her Erasmus programme.
“The news freaked me out,” she told The Black Sea. “I knew a baby would complicate my career and I was not ready for it.”
The next few weeks and months were crucial. She’d not only her Erasmus responsibilities in Germany to consider, but Bianca was also due to sit a series of final-year medical exams at her university in Romania before beginning a hospital residency.
Bianca took the decision to end her pregnancy quickly, and from her temporary home in Daegu she considered the least complicated way to do this. . . [Full text]
The Telegraph
A Christian doctor lost his job in a government department after he refused to refer to “a six-foot-tall bearded man” as ‘madam’, a tribunal heard.
Dr David Mackereth, 56, claims he was sacked as a disability benefits assessor by the Department of Work and Pensions over his religious beliefs.
The father-of-four alleges he was asked in a conversation with a line manager: “If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as ‘she’ and ‘Mrs’, would you do that?”
Dr Mackereth, an evangelist who now works as an emergency doctor in Shropshire, claims his contract was then terminated over his refusal to use transgendered pronouns. . . [Full text]
Crux
When church leaders in the United States face new bioethical questions – such as those surrounding abortion, euthanasia, or gender identity – they often turn to the Philadelphia-based National Catholic Bioethics Center. . .
. . . It was announced this month that Dr. Joseph Meaney, the director of international outreach and expansion for Human Life International, will be taking over as the president of the NCBC.
Speaking to Crux, he said bioethics is “an almost exponentially growing field.” . . .
. . . He said the greatest challenges in the coming years will be “from gender ideology issues such as sex-change surgeries and drugs and also end of life issues, particularly assisted suicide and euthanasia.” . . .
. . .He told Crux there is “a very broad and concerted attack on conscience rights in many Western countries,” including over abortion and assisted suicide. Meaney said this doesn’t just affect doctors, but also nurses, midwives, and pharmacists.
What follows are excerpts of his conversation with Crux. [Full text]