Service, not Servitude
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. . . .
Full Text
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]
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]
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]
Polly Thompson asserts that religious tolerance is “a bedrock value of our democracy, and it goes both ways,” but then claims that “the onus is on the health professional to respect the religious beliefs of the patient, not the other way around,” a most peculiar form of tolerant reciprocity. The balance of the editorial demonstrates a troubling ignorance of the legal requirements to accommodate conscientious objectors[1] and de facto contempt of the “bedrock value” she purports to respect in theory. (The Public Trust and Access to Medication, Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal, October, 2004, Vol. 137, No. 8).
Patients and pharmacists have equal claims to freedom of conscience and expression, but one looks in vain in the editorial for a thoughtful analysis of how to deal fairly with conflicts of conscience in health care. A principled approach to conscientious objection would, among other things, distinguish between life-threatening injuries or conditions, and non-emergent situations. To equate the provision of blood transfusions for accident victims with dispensing contraceptives or post-coital interceptives suggests a disappointing editorial interest in polemics, not principle.
Thompson is mistaken when she claims that some pharmacists raise religious objections to her access to medication. Their concerns are not with her access, but with their own moral culpability should they facilitate harmful conduct or other wrongdoing by someone else.
The fact that a drug is legal does not determine this issue. By way of comparison, mouthwash is a legal product commonly sold in pharmacies. It can also be an intoxicant when consumed as a beverage. A conscientious pharmacist might well refuse to sell mouthwash to an alcoholic known to consume it for that purpose, whether or not the product could be accessed elsewhere.
Similarly, the practice of law is a self-regulated profession, and, like pharmacists, lawyers are expected to serve the interests of their clients. But a client cannot force a lawyer to facilitate what the lawyer considers to be a wrongful act – even if the act is legal.
Ms. Thompson’s fierce determination to adhere to her own moral views is not surprising, but she has failed to demonstrate that her morality is so superior that it should be imposed upon those who disagree with her. Indeed, she did not even attempt such a demonstration before calling for the elimination of “troubling holes” and “wiggle room” that make grudging allowance for freedom of conscience in pharmacy. Her message to those unwilling to go along with her is uncompromising; get out of the profession. Given this totalitarian mindset, Ms. Thompson’s complaint that ‘fundamentalist extremists’ dictate policy in the United States invites the waggish response that in Canada they write editorials for professional journals.
Pharmacy regulatory authorities can, with some imagination and good will, find ways to ensure “timely access to legal medication” without suppressing of freedom of conscience in the profession. The Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal can contribute to this kind of fruitful accommodation. But the profession and the public are not well served by the kind of incoherence, intolerance, polemics and ignorance of human rights jurisprudence displayed in its October editorial.
Sean Murphy, Administrator
Protection of Conscience Project
Notes
1. Benson I. “Autonomy”, “Justice” and the Legal Requirement to Accommodate the Conscience and Religious Beliefs of Professionals in Health Care [Internet]. Powell River (BC): Protection of Conscience Project; 2001 Mar. The Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal declined to publish the essay, which was a response to an article by Frank Archer that had appeared in an earlier number of the Journal. See also Murphy S. In Defence of the New Heretics: A Response to Frank Archer [Internet]. Powell River (BC): Protection of Conscience Project; 2000 Jul – also declined by the CPJ.