Category: Commentary

Equality Act’s Attack on Religious Liberty, Medical Conscience

National Review

Reproduced with permission

Wesley J. Smith

President Biden said during the campaign that he supported the Equality Act, which is being sold as a means of guaranteeing equality for LGBT people.

But it does more than that. It would destroy medical conscience by removing existing protections that permit doctors and nurses to refuse participation in abortion, and it would gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute’s associate scholar Richard Doerflinger explains in a white paper he authored on the bill. From “The ‘Equality Act’: Threatening Life and Equality:”

The Equality Act’s new freestanding ban on pregnancy discrimination . . . adds the new requirement for women to receive “treatment” for pregnancy that is as “favorable” as treatment for any other “physical condition” . . . . It provides rules of construction indicating that the new requirement should be interpreted as broadly as possible. . . . And it negates the existing religious freedom law that allows believers to seek an exemption from such requirements based on sincere religious beliefs such as respect for human life.

That’s the end of medical conscience, an aspect of freedom of religion that permits doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in the termination of pregnancies.

That’s not all. The bill guts the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a defense against acts deemed discriminatory in the bill. Among other wrongs, this could force Catholic hospitals to permit sterilization, contraception, abortion, and transgender surgeries on premises despite their being prohibited by Catholic moral teaching.

Interestingly the ACLU once understood the importance of protecting Catholic hospitals from such impositions. It now supports the Equality Act:

It is notable that in 1992 the ACLU recognized a religious hospital’s right to decline involvement even in contraception. This is also a service related to pregnancy, so would presumably be required of religious hospitals under the Equality Act – as would removal of a woman’s healthy uterus, surgically sterilizing her, to facilitate her transition to a male gender identity.

As noted above, the Equality Act’s mandates and its elimination of any defense under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would also reverse the outcome of Supreme Court cases on the Affordable Care Act, subjecting the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious entities to a mandate for contraceptive and early abortifacient  coverage.

Read the whole paper. It is a sobering assessment.

The Equality Act is a blatant act of cultural imperialism and a high-priority agenda item for the new administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress. So much for “unity.”

Doctors need to study the lessons of the Holocaust, says ethics journal

BioEdge

Michael Cook*

Doctors need to study the lessons of the Holocaust, says ethics journal

The illustration for the editorial of the January issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics comes from the “doctor’s trials” at Nuremburg in 1947. A young and sullen-looking young woman wearing earphones stands between two helmeted soldier in the dock. She is Dr. Herta Oberhauser, the only woman in the trials, and she was being sentenced to 20 years imprisonment (of which she served only five) for crimes against humanity. She experimented on women at the Ravensbruck concentration camp – deliberately creating gangrenous wounds to test the efficacy of sulpha drugs. She also gave lethal injections to several of her patients.

Oberhauser was one of the small fry amongst the Nazi doctors and nurses who committed medical atrocities before and during World War II.

The journal’s special issue is intended to help doctors not to forget what can happen if healthcare workers misuse their special skills and status. Surprisingly, the editors say that many American doctors are unaware that bioethics arose from the experience of the Nuremburg trials.

the historical impact or resonance of the Holocaust in bioethics has generally been at a low frequency in the United States. This painful history has largely been overlooked in American medical education, perhaps because to examine it closely one must first disturb the comfortable view of our nation and our profession as entirely heroic actors in the Second World War.

They argue that the year 2020, with the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, has shown American doctors that they, too, need to be aware of dark corners of medicine in their own country.

it became widely recognized as problematic—and not just in the United States—to view medical professionals as purely altruistic, color-blind healers, blameless in creating and sustaining health care systems that predictably and consistently generate racial and ethnic health disparities.

The medical history of the Holocaust remains relevant – and essential – in a sound medical education.

[P]erhaps the year 2021 will become the year in which every health professional training program awakens to the fact that health sciences students (and practitioners) must learn about and reflect upon the historical roles of health professionals in creating both the atrocities of the Second World War and the different but related atrocities of racial injustice that we witness today. After all, these legacies are deeply entwined. Our profession’s involvement in providing the pseudoscientific foundations that supported ethnic and racial violence during the Second World War cannot be disentangled from the history of scientific racism and its ongoing, powerful, and pervasive influence on the world today.

This fascinating issue of the journal contains several articles about aspects of the Holocaust and medical education. It is well worth reading.

Doctors need to study the lessons of the Holocaust, says ethics journal

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MAiD Muscles In

B.C.’s Delta Hospice Society being evicted, assets expropriated for refusing to allow euthanasia and assisted suicide

Convivium

Peter Stockland*

You might think the middle of a global pandemic is less than an ideal time to disrupt the operations of a hospice where palliative care patients receive comfort as they approach death.

If so, you would not share the apparent thinking of the B.C. government or its local Fraser Health Authority, which as of today has forced layoffs of staff at the Irene Thomas Hospice in suburban Vancouver. The dismissals are part of the eviction of the Delta Hospice Society that oversees the facility.

In a conversation yesterday, DHS board President Angelina Ireland confirmed for me that the pink slips were to be given out this morning because the Society refuses to administer Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) on its premises. As of February 24, the DHS will have to relinquish the palliative care centre that it raised $9 million a decade ago to construct on Fraser Health Authority land. Its 35-year lease on the property will be nullified, and its other assets expropriated, Ireland says. . . [Full text]

On Sex and Gender, The New England Journal of Medicine Has Abandoned Its Scientific Mission

Quillette

Colin Wright*

Two years ago, “Titania McGrath,” whose satirical Twitter account regularly skewers the ideological excesses of social-justice culture, suggested that “we should remove biological sex from birth certificates altogether to prevent any more mistakes.” The joke (obvious to those who follow the culture wars closely, but perhaps obscure to those who don’t) was directed at gender activists who insist that male and female designations “assigned at birth” are misleading (and even dangerous), since they may misrepresent a person’s true “gender identity”—that internally felt soul-like quality that supposedly transcends such superficial physical indicia as gonads and genitalia.

But the line between satire and sincerity has become blurry on this issue. Last Thursday, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), widely considered to be the world’s most prestigious medical journal, published an article entitled Failed Assignments—Rethinking Sex Designations on Birth Certificates, arguing that (in the words of the abstract) “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people.” The resemblance to Titania McGrath’s 2018-era Twitter feed is uncanny. Two of the authors are doctors. The third, Jessica A. Clarke, is a law school professor who seeks to remake our legal system so as to “recognize nonbinary gender identities or eliminate unnecessary legal sex classifications.” . . . Full Text

Forcing a Hospice to Euthanize in Canada

National Review

Wesley J. Smith

Euthanasia is more than just legal in Canada. It has become a government-guaranteed right.

But how to guarantee that the legally qualified who want to die are made dead? Unless the government establishes killing centers out of Soylent Green, it will have to coerce doctors to do the killing or procure the euthanasia doctor -called “effective referral” — as has been done in Ontario. And, it will have to force medical facilities into allowing euthanasia on premises, whether their administators like it or not.

Such an imposition is now taking place in British Columbia, where the Delta Hospice board of directors are standing tall for the hospice philosophy of caring — but never killing — by refusing to permit euthanasia in the facililty. In response, the BC Health Minister is threatening to restrict funding in the single-payer system, which, ironically, would undercut the facilities ability to care optimally for their patients who don’t want to be killed. From the Globe and Mail story:

A B.C. hospice society that refuses to provide medical assistance in dying at its facility in violation of local rules has been given until Thursday to submit plans for compliance.

Health Minister Adrian Dix said the Delta Hospice Society, which operates the Irene Thomas Hospice in Ladner, may face penalties if it fails to do so.

“We’ve asked them … to provide their plan to fulfill their contract with the Fraser Health Authority and it is our expectation that they will,” Mr. Dix said on Wednesday. “Should they not want to fulfill their contract with Fraser Health, there may well be consequences of that.”

It it my understanding that there is a Fraser hospital directly across the street from the hospice where patients are euthanized. It would be easy to move hospice patients who want to have that done to the hospital where they could be put down according to their desire. But even if that weren’t true, so long as the hospice advises patients that euthanasia is not permitted on site, why force the issue? Why threaten to bring financial ruin upon a small, heterodox-managed institution?

Forcing a Hospice to Euthanize in Canada

Because of the message that Delta sends that euthanasia is morally wrong and an improper way to treat terminally ill patients. That is what burns. Hence, the authoritarian response of the government.

This is both a civil rights issue and a matter of basic compassion. Think about the patient in the next bed who values life and knows that his neighbor is being killed by a doctor. That would be both terrifying and morale destroying because of the cruel message communicated that his life — like that of the neighbor — is no longer deemed worth protecting.

The ongoing assault on medical conscience in Canada demonstrates how the culture of death brooks no dissent. The same thing will happen here if we let the wolf in the door. Those with eyes to see, let them see.