(USA: 2008)
- Freedom2Care.org | Brief examples that demonstrate the often subtle, sometimes flagrant and increasingly pervasive discrimination faced by pro-life, faith-based and conscience-driven individuals in the healthcare professions. Full Text
The Clash of Universalisms: Religious and Secular in Human Rights
The Hedgehog Review
Fall, 2007
The major thrust of Islamic critique of the Declaration, however, is its secularism and its implied hostility to divergent philosophical or religious ideas. . . Perhaps the sore point in the secular human rights discourse, as far as Muslim theoreticians of rights language are concerned, is the total dismissal of anything religious as being an impediment to the modern development of human rights. . . .
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Vivisectionist recalls his day of reckoning
Doctor put conscience on hold until war atrocity confession time came
The Japan Times
Donning the crisp, Imperial Japanese Army khakis gave Ken Yuasa a sense of power, as a superior being on a mission to liberate China from Western colonialism.
“The uniform made me feel incredibly sharp. Once I put it on, I was convinced Japan would triumph,” recalled the wartime surgeon, who was deployed to Changzhi (then Luan) in Shanxi Province in February 1942.
His fervor, and the nationalist indoctrination of his schooling, quickly subordinated any sense of conscience. By his second month at Luan’s army hospital, Yuasa was aggressively performing vivisections on live Chinese prisoners, and diverting dysentery and typhoid bacillus to Japanese troops for use in biological warfare.
“I was in denial of the things I did in Luan until the war was over. It was because I had no sense of remorse while I was doing it,” Yuasa, 90, told The Japan Times in a recent interview.
“We believed that the orders from the top were absolute. We performed the vivisections as ordered. We erased any sense of culpability by doing so, even though what we did was horrendous.” [Full text]
Ethical misconduct by abuse of conscientious objection laws
Med Law. 2006 Sep;25(3):513-22. PubMed PMID: 17078524
Abstract:
This paper addresses laws and practices urged by conservative religious organizations that invoke conscientious objection in order to deny patients access to lawful procedures. Many are reproductive health services, such as contraception, sterilization and abortion, on which women’s health depends. Religious institutions that historically served a mission to provide healthcare are now perverting this commitment in order to deny care. Physicians who followed their calling honourably in a spirit of self-sacrifice are being urged to sacrifice patients’ interests to promote their own, compromising their professional ethics by conflict of interest. The shield tolerant societies allowed to protect religious conscience is abused by religiously-influenced agencies that beat it into a sword to compel patients, particularly women, to comply with religious values they do not share. This is unethical unless accompanied by objectors’ duty of referral to non-objecting practitioners, and governmental responsibility to ensure supply of and patients’ access to such practitioners. [Full Text]
Dawson’s licence revoked for sexual misconduct
Physician who refused birth control to unmarried had sex with patient
On 9 May, 2005, the Discipline Committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario revoked Dr. Dawson’s registration as a physician for having engaged in the sexual abuse of a married female patient. He was ordered to appear before a panel to be reprimanded and to pay costs to the College in the amount of $2,500.00. A summary of the judgement is available on the College website. [Full text]