Latest newsletter #177 Click to read online

Health care without conscience

Editorial

Freedom of conscience for pro-life health-care professionals is under relentless assault, both in Australia and overseas.

Thirteen years ago, Victoria passed its infamous Abortion Law Reform Act, allowing doctors to kill an unborn child up to the end of the full term of pregnancy (that is, when the baby is the same age or older than babies being born alive).

Among the Act's many evil innovations was one obliging all doctors, without exception, to refer any patient seeking an abortion to another health-care provider willing to perform the procedure.

What initially seemed to be a Victorian aberration unfortunately became a harbinger and blueprint for similar laws enacted elsewhere in Australia and overseas, covering not only abortion but also euthanasia.

Just recently, Queensland's parliament passed a controversial Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill. The new law overrides "conscientious objection" by doctors and nurses opposed to euthanasia. It forces all Queensland hospitals and nursing homes — including the 20 per cent of them that are Catholic — to allow terminally ill patients to be killed on their premises by surrendering power to doctors willing to administer lethal injections.

In 2019, a Canadian Court of Appeals closed the last remaining loopholes allowing doctors the right to exercise their religious freedoms and moral consciences. It ruled that Canadian doctors must be compelled not only to abort or refer, but also to perform euthanasia or refer.

These sinister international developments should concern us all, as they are transforming health care out of recognition.

A militant opponent of doctors' conscience rights is Melbourne-born academic Julian Savulescu, currently an ethics professor at Oxford. Fifteen years ago, he urged that any doctor unwilling to arrange an abortion should be "punished through removal of licence to practise and other legal mechanisms".

He denounced conscientious objection as opening "a door to a Pandora's box of idiosyncratic, bigoted, discriminatory medicine", which, he asserted, should have no place in modern medical practice (British Medical Journal, February 2006).

The relentless campaign across the world to deprive doctors of their conscience rights has been condemned by American pro-life bioethicist and lawyer Wesley J. Smith, who says, "Forcing doctors to be complicit in the taking of human life or face potential civil/professional consequences is despotism."

About the 2019 Canadian court ruling, he wrote: "The point of opposing medical conscience is to drive pro-life and Hippocratic Oath-believing doctors out of medicine. The Court goes there, telling doctors who don't want to euthanize, abort, facilitate sex change, etc., they can always get into hair restoration" (National Review, May 16, 2019).

Canadian law lecturer and author Brian Bird has added his voice to those warning of the dangers of divorcing health care from ethical considerations. He says: "The doctor who conscientiously refuses to participate in abortion or euthanasia does so because he/she considers these acts to be lethal violence against a human being. You might disagree with these beliefs, but they are not crazy. They are rationally defensible and deserve a fair hearing."

Unfortunately, in many parts of the world today, health-care professionals can no longer distance themselves from procedures they consider unethical. But why should a doctor who has moral objections to, say, abortion be forced to arrange for one? Dr Bird asks, "If you believe it is wrong to rob a bank, would you be willing to plan the robbery?" (CBC Opinion, August 25, 2021).

The practice of medicine, rightly understood, has traditionally been a vocation guided by the highest ethics and committed at all times to healing and alleviating suffering. It is summed up in the famous phrase of the Hippocratic Oath: "Do no harm." Requiring doctors opposed to abortion and euthanasia to provide effective referrals for these procedures is the antithesis of this.

As soon as you compel doctors to be complicit in killing the unborn, the terminally ill and the elderly, you have transformed the profession of medicine out of recognition. We have entered the era of what Wesley Smith calls "do harm" medicine.

This gross violation of conscience rights curbs forever a doctor's freedom to exercise his independent professional judgement as it attempts to turn him into a compliant puppet of the state.


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