Tag: transfer of care

Conscientious objection: Can a hospital refuse to provide treatment?

Baylor College of Medicine

Claire Horner

Canada recently legalized medical assistance in dying (MAiD), which allows patients to receive a lethal drug that they can self-administer, or be administered a lethal drug by an authorized clinician with consent of the patient. As provinces and territories work to create and clarify legal guidelines for providing MAiD, many Catholic hospitals have refused to offer it, citing opposition to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in Catholic moral teaching.

This controversy surrounding institutional conscience-based refusals raises an important question: Should a health care institution have the right to refuse to provide a particular treatment for conscience-based reasons? . . . [Full text]

Ontario hospitals allowed to opt out of assisted dying, raising conscientious accommodation concerns

National Post

Sharon Kirkey

Ontario will allow hospitals to opt out of providing assisted death within their walls, provoking charges from ethicists that conscientious accommodation has gone too far.

Elsewhere in the country, a divide is already shaping up, with half of voluntary euthanasia cases in Quebec reportedly occurring in Quebec City hospitals — and few in Montreal.

The situation highlights the messy state of the emotionally charged debate as the provinces wrestle with the new reality of doctor-assisted death, and as the Senate takes a proposed new law further than the governing Liberals are prepared to go. . . [Full Text]

 

Does an Illinois bill threaten doctors’ conscience rights? Depends on whom you ask

Catholic News Agency

Matt Hadro

Springfield, Ill., May 29, 2015 / 03:13 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- An Illinois bill that some say threatens the conscience rights of medical providers is currently under consideration in the state’s general assembly.

Catholics and pro-lifers are divided among themselves over the implications of SB 1564 for the conscience rights of medical providers.

While the state’s Catholic Conference is neutral on the bill, the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom states that it “would force medical facilities and physicians who conscientiously object to involvement in abortions (and other procedures) to refer for, make arrangements for someone else to perform, or arrange referral information that lists willing providers, for abortions.” . . . [Full text]