Protection of Conscience Project News
Service, not Servitude
An investigation by the Daily Mail has revealed that some physicians in the United Kingdom will arrange for sex-selective abortions. A physician suspended by the General Medical Council following the disclosure agreed to falsify the reason for the procedure. Another physician and an obstetrician/gynaecologist also face discipline. [Daily Mail]
The Prosblogion
. . . Our moral intuitions while being a genuine source of moral knowledge are often distorted by the desire to find excuses for our own faults or, more excusably, those of
friends. Moral intuitions should not be glorified with the name “conscience”. . .
Full Text
Dr. Carmen Rodriguez, the president of the Asturias Medical College, the official physician’s association for the region of Asturias in the north of Spain, told a local paper that society can make laws concerning abortion, but cannot force physicians to participate in them. [LifeSite News]
From 1946 to 1948, American and Guatemalan physicians infected prostitutes and prisoners with syphilis without their knowledge or consent in order to test penicillin. The research was discovered by a Wellesley College professor in 2009, and lawyers for the victims filed a class-action lawsuit against the United States. The Obama administration claims that the US is immune from such lawsuits, but has announced that it will spend $1 million to review new rules to protect medical research volunteers, $775,000 to fight sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala, and will develop a system to compensate anyone harmed in medical research. Lawyers for the Guatemalan victims say that the promised action is inconsistent with the claim of immunity. [Washington Post]
The American College of Physicians has acknowledged that physicians who object to “abortion, sterilization, contraception or other reproductive services . . . is not obligated to recommend, perform or prescribe them.” The statement is in the most recent edition of the College’s Ethics Manual. However, an objecting physician is obliged to advise a patient of “care options and alternatives, so that the patient’s rights are not constrained.” Only if the physician is unwilling to provide this information is a transfer of care required. [Secondhand Smoke]