Wesley Smith, Special Consultant to the CBC has a great piece on rights of conscience for the health care provider in the U.S. As some of you may know, these rights of conscience are being challenged today, so much so that health care workers may be forced out of their jobs if they will not comply with providing abortions, assisting in suicides etc.
Wesley writes this,
“Opposition to protecting the right of conscience has suddenly grown so intense that it is easy to foresee physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who hold to the orthodox understanding of the Hippocratic Oath being forced out of medicine altogether, a draconian approach explicitly proposed in a December 24, 2008 editorial in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which opined:
“Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists choose professions that put patients’ rights first. If they foresee that priority becoming problematic for them, they should choose another profession.”
Imagine: being declared persona non grata in medicine merely for wishing to abide by an ethic that was considered mandatory for all doctors as recently as forty years ago.”
Full article can be read here:
The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network
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