The Hippocratic Oath specifically forbids physicians from committing abortion or euthanasia. So that oath isn’t used much in the medical profession any more. But doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the United States can still refuse to perform abortions on the grounds of conscience.
But now a concerted effort is underway to eliminate that conscience provision. Lawmakers, professional organizations, and medical ethicists are considering making it a requirement that doctors do whatever their patients request. “Personal morality has no place in medical practice.”
Under the proposed changes, a pro-life obstetrician must either perform the abortion or arrange for someone else to do it. Or go into a different specialty. Or leave the medical profession.
Wesley J. Smith reports on what is happening, linked after the jump, focusing on a recent article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
From Wesley J. Smith, Pro-Lifers: Get Out of Medicine! | Wesley J. Smith | First Things:
Doctors in the United States cannot be forced to perform abortions or assist suicides. But that may soon change. Bioethicists and other medical elites have launched a frontal assault against doctors seeking to practice their professions under the values established by the Hippocratic Oath. The campaign’s goal? To force doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others in the health field who hold pro-life or orthodox religious views to choose between their careers and their convictions.
Ethics opinions, legislation, and court filings seeking to deny “medical conscience” have proliferated as journals, legislative bodies, and the courts have taken up the cause. In the last year, these efforts have moved from the relative hinterlands of professional discussions into the center of establishment medical discourse. Most recently, preeminent bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel—one of Obamacare’s principal architects—coauthored with Ronit Y. Stahl an attack on medical conscience in the New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the world’s most prestigious medical journal. When advocacy of this kind is published by the NEJM, it is time to sound the air raid sirens.
The authors take an absolutist position, claiming that personal morality has no place in medical practice. Under the pretext of “patients’ rights” and a supposed obligation of doctors to adhere to the medical moral consensus—a tyranny of the majority, if you will—Emanuel and Stahl would prohibit doctors from conscientiously objecting to performing requested procedures on moral grounds.
[Keep reading. . .]
Illustration, Summary of the Hippocratic Oath, by Eden, Janine, and Jim, Flickr, Creative Commons License
The Hippocratic Oath specifically forbids physicians from committing abortion or euthanasia. So that oath isn’t used much in the medical profession any more. But doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the United States can still refuse to perform abortions on the grounds of conscience.
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