Italian bill would fund ‘sex assistants’ for the disabled

LifeSite News

Hilary White

ROME – Italy’s Senate is considered a bill introduced in April that would mandate the government to offer “sexual assistants” to people with physical, mental or cognitive disabilities.

The bill, which would bring Italy in line with other EU countries, proposes that these “assistants” should be male and female professional “sex workers” who would help their clients gain “erotic, sensual or sexual experience and better address their internal energies” in order to help them “discharge dysfunctional feelings of anger and aggression.”

Disabled Italians will be eligible for government-funded “sex assistants” through the Ministry of Health. They must have reached the age of majority, have completed the “compulsory education” program, signed a code of conduct, and be certified as to their “psycho-sexual suitability” by the local health authority. . . [Full text]

Polish conscience tested: the case of Professor Chazan

LifeSite News

Natalia Dueholm

WARSAW, Poland — The most recent case in Poland’s abortion wars will test the country’s conscience.

The case centers around Professor Bogdan Chazan, one of Poland’s top doctors and director of the Holy Family Hospital in Warsaw (Szpital im. Świętej Rodziny).  Chazan came under fire last month when he refused to perform an abortion on a deformed baby who had been conceived in vitro in a fertility clinic.  Instead of an abortion, Chazan offered medical advice for the mother, hospital care before, during, and after the pregnancy, and perinatal hospice care for the child.

Although Polish law permits abortion of sick babies until viability, it does not create the right to an abortion. It merely decriminalizes abortion for the doctor and the mother.  This particular pregnancy did not pose a danger to the woman’s health. Also, according to Polish law, any physician can invoke the country’s conscience clause, which ensures that no doctor or medical professional will ever be required to perform, or participate in, an abortion.  Nonetheless, Chazan’s hospital was fined 70,000 zloty (approximately $23,000) for his refusal. [Full text]

What are the issues in post-mortem sperm retrieval?

Bioedge

Michael Cook

In 2010 21-year-old Niklas Evans was assaulted outside a bar in Texas. He ended up in a coma and died after 10 days. His heartbroken mother, Missy Evans, requested the hospital to retrieve her son’s sperm so that she could create a grandchild with a surrogate mother. The case was too controversial for American fertility clinics so she ended up travelling to South Africa.

Did Missy and her doctors act ethically in removing sperm from Niklas’s dead body without his consent? This is the question that Anna Smajdor, of the University of East Anglia, tackles in the Journal of Medical Ethics, based on a discussion of some cases which have occurred in England. Like many other bioethicists, she opposes it.

The dead still have interests. The logic of post-mortem sperm retrieval without explicit consent could be extended to many other issues,  like organ extraction, exhibition of the body, probate law and so on. Legally speaking, much more than a child is at stake.

The validity of inferred consent is a dangerous principle. “In medicine generally, consent for procedure X cannot be inferred from someone’s previous beliefs about situation Y,” she writes. If men knew what was involved in electro-ejaculation, they might well refuse their consent, even if they did express a wish to have children.

Proxy consent for one’s own benefit is a dangerous principle. She writes: 

Relatives can agree to donate a loved one’s tissue, but they cannot demand access to that tissue for themselves. The reasons for this are straightforward. Human tissues and organs are valuable commodities. This means that the bodies of dead and dying patients are vulnerable to exploitation. If the person testifying as to the patient’s wishes and providing proxy consent is alsothe one who stands to gain from the tissue that is made available, there is a clear conflict of interest.

The desire for offspring is not sufficient reason. From a woman’s ardent desire for a child one cannot infer consent. “Couples’ reproductive decisions are not necessarily based on symmetrical and equally held desires … It is risky and unjust to assume that one partner’s reproductive desires can be inferred from those of the other. And if this is the case in the living, it is still more so in the case of the dead or dying, who cannot articulate their dissent.”

Smajdor makes two specific recommendations. First, that the rules for posthumous gamete donation be tightened. Second, that the discretionary authority of the UK’s fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, be rescinded so that it cannot permit the export of gametes obtained without consent.

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If you want birth control pills, go to a different doctor

 Calgary Herald
Reproduced with permission

John Carpay

A Calgary doctor’s refusal to prescribe birth control pills has triggered demands for her ouster from the medical profession.

Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Jim Prentice has denounced the doctor’s choice to follow her conscience as inconsistent with “a doctor’s obligation in a public health-care system.” Apparently Prentice believes that a doctor should simply do and provide whatever the patient wants done and provided, regardless of the doctor’s education, training, experience, conscience, and professional judgment.

This raises some interesting questions. If a doctor, based on her experience and research, believes that liberation therapy (dilating and opening blocked neck veins) is not a good option for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, must she provide that therapy simply because the patient demands it?

What about a doctor who is convinced that anti-cholesterol pills do more harm than good? What if a doctor refuses to prescribe birth control pills because she believes, apart from any religious teaching, that they compromise women’s health? Should this physician disregard her own research, analysis and conclusions and prescribe what she considers to be a dangerous product?

Does it really matter whether the doctor’s belief is characterized as scientific, religious, metaphysical, conscientious, or something else?

Certainly a doctor’s beliefs about what is, or is not, good medicine will sometimes inconvenience a patient. But what would be the consequences of forcing doctors to abandon their professional judgment and violate their conscience in order to pander to patients’ wishes? If the government compels doctors to supply whatever patients demand, this presupposes that a patient’s knowledge, training and judgment is at least equal to that of the doctor’s. And if so, why bother with a medical profession in the first place? If individual doctors don’t have the right to reach their own conclusions as to what is good or bad, why bother to distinguish doctors from those who are not doctors?

These same questions apply to other professions and occupations. Would Jim Prentice (who is a lawyer) impose this same standard on lawyers who refuse to act for a client, or who decline to take a particular case, because the lawyer’s conscience says that doing so would be wrong? Our legal system is as public as the medical system. Why not remove from lawyers their current right to refuse to advance a cause that the lawyer believes to be unjust? Should lawyers be permitted to inconvenience prospective clients by telling them to find another lawyer? Shouldn’t clients be entitled to receive from a particular lawyer whatever services they demand?

The same question about a consumer’s supposed right to be free from inconvenience arises in other contexts. Should a Jewish or Muslim butcher be compelled to sell pork to the public, just because pork is popular? Or should the citizens of a free society exhibit tolerance and respect for the conscience of these businessmen, and suffer the inconvenience of buying pork elsewhere?

A free and democratic society allows consumers and providers to accept or decline each other’s business, without state coercion. In a free society, the government does not force doctors, lawyers, butchers and other people to do things that they do not wish to do. This is freedom, and it sometimes causes inconveniences. But freedom cannot coexist with a purported “right” of patients, clients and consumers to use government’s coercive power to obtain whatever goods or services they want, from unwilling suppliers.

People who cherish our free society understand that the inconvenience of not immediately getting what you want is part of life. We live in a society where people have all manner of differing beliefs and commitments. Part of the price we pay for freedom is that not everyone will wish to help you do what you want. You may need to find a different doctor, or another lawyer. You may need to go to a different butcher or restaurant to buy pork. People who disagree with you are people too.

If Jim Prentice respects the freedom of lawyers to decline cases and clients, he should support the right of doctors – and everyone else – to do likewise. That would be consistent with the free society of which Albertans are rightfully proud.

 

Calgary doctor who won’t prescribe birth control backed by pro-life medical professionals

 LifeSite News

Pete Balinski

CALGARY, Alberta — After a doctor received national flak for refusing to prescribe contraception in a Calgary walk-in clinic, an Alberta pharmacist and a British Columbia doctor have risen to her defense.

“I commend her on her stance and courage,” clinical pharmacist Denis Nawrocki, a member of Pharmacists for Life International, told LifeSiteNews. “She has every professional right to exercise her conscience and keep to her convictions. Congratulations are in order.”

The story broke last week that Dr. Chantal Barry of the Westglen Medical Centre in Calgary does not prescribe ‘the pill’ after one irate woman posted to her Facebook account a picture of a sign on the facility’s front desk.

“Please be informed that the physician on duty today will not prescribe the birth control pill,” the sign reads.

“I was shocked and outraged,” Joan Chand’oiseau, 45, who posted the picture to Facebook, told Postmedia News. “I don’t think her belief system should have any part in my reproductive health.” . . . [Full text]