Tag: Bogdan Chazan

We need to remember the lessons on abortion and conscience before we legalise assisted suicide

Catholic Herald

Francis  Phillips

Cases such as Dr. Chazan’s should make us think twice

On holiday last week I got into conversation with an atheist friend. The subject of abortion came up and whether a doctor or nurse has a right in conscience to refuse to participate in such a “procedure.” I cited the recent case of a prominent Polish Catholic doctor who had refused to perform an abortion. My atheist friend was annoyed. “What do you mean, he refused?” he said. “If it’s the law he has to comply with it.” By way of bolstering his argument he added, “Don’t doctors know that performing abortions is just part of their job?”

I countered this by saying that saving life and healing the sick was intrinsic to practising medicine; performing abortions wasn’t; indeed, the law of 1967 permitting it had run counter to all traditional notions of medicine from the Hippocratic Oath onwards. I added that I had read that many new medical graduates are now refusing to do abortions – not for religious reasons but because it wasn’t what they thought doctoring should be about. I added that this made medicine quite different from e.g. conscientious objection in war: being prepared to kill the enemy was intrinsic to soldiering; if you were a pacifist you would know this, so you would refuse to join up on conscientious grounds. . . [Full text]

Abortion row child dies

 Polski Radio

The baby at the centre of a pro-life row that has divided Poles died on Wednesday just hours after the professor who refused to abort the child was informed he would be dismissed.

Marcin Dubienecki, lawyer of the child’s mother, confirmed that the baby – which had serious brain defects – had been born in Warsaw’s Bielanski Hospital on 30 June.

“On behalf of my client, I am passing on the information that the child ‘whose life was saved’ by Professor Chazan died at 8.35 pm [on Wednesday],” he told the TVN24 news channel.

“The child was in a very serious condition. “All of the arguments that the child should never have been born proved correct,” he claimed. [Full text]

Pro-life doctor who refused abortion to be sacked

 Polskie Radio

Warsaw’s mayor has announced that Prof. Chazan’s contract will be “terminated in accordance with the law,” after he refused a termination to a woman carrying a foetus with severe defects.

Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz announced on Wednesday the findings of a report into the Roman Catholic doctor’s activities at the Holy Family hospital in the Polish capital, after Chazan, who is director at the hospital, refused the woman an abortion – citing a ‘conscience clause’ – but then declined to refer the woman to another hospital or physician. [Full text]

Poland asks: should a doctor serve God, or patients?

Reuters

Marcin Goettig and Aneta Pomieczynska

(Reuters) – In April this year, a pregnant woman asked Professor Bogdan Chazan, director of Warsaw’s Holy Family Hospital, for an abortion because her own physician had diagnosed her unborn child with grave health problems.

Chazan sent the woman a letter saying he could not agree to an abortion in his hospital because of a “conflict of conscience,” and instead gave the woman the address of a hospice where, he said, the child could get palliative care once born.

The baby was born at a different hospital with, according to a doctor there, severe head and facial deformities and a brain that was not viable, conditions which the doctor said would result in the child’s death within a month or two. . .

. . . On Wednesday, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the mayor of the Polish capital, said she was firing Chazan from the hospital on the grounds that he did not have the right to refuse the abortion and did not inform the woman about the options for getting a termination. [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]