rights of conscience

DOJ: Government Can Force Doctors to Violate Religion

A doctor can be forced to violate her religious beliefs in the operation of her practice, according to the Obama Dept. of Justice. Attention must be paid. This is a step beyond the radical DOJ argument made previously in the Free Birth Control Rule cases, e.g., that business owners do not have freedom of religion [...]

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Docs Forced to do Sex Change Surgeries?

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC There is tremendous pressure being placed on doctors and other medical professionals to eschew their own moral consciences in the provision of medical services — as distinguished from treatments. Now, in the UK, doctors who refuse to perform gender reassignment surgeries and prescribe contraception for [...]

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When Medical Conscience Goes Too Far

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC A bill has been proposed in New Hampshire to protect medical conscience. You’d think I’d be thrilled, right? Wrong. This bill would permit doctors to refuse to save the life of a patient and to discriminate against people based on invidious bigotry. The intent is [...]

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Should Doctors Be Forced to Kill?

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC I have a piece in the Daily Caller about protecting the conscience rights of medical professionals who wish to maintain traditional Hippocratic Values. First, I set up the context. From “Should Doctors be Forced to Kill?” Fifty years ago, doctors would have been excoriated professionally [...]

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Medical Conscience: All Dutch Doctors Must be Complicit in Euthanasia Killing

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC I have been fighting the international campaign to legalize and normalize doctor-prescribed/administered death since 1993, and this much I know: Once euthanasia is let in the door, ultimately, enough is never, ever enough. Par exemple: Euthanasia activists often assure that no doctor will be forced [...]

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Medical Students May Support Overbroad View of Conscience Rights

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC I am a strong believer in medical conscience rights — properly defined and narrowly construed. Apparently, a poll of medical students in the UK found strong support for their right as doctors to refuse to treat certain patients. I worry that is too broad an [...]

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Burying Hippocrates: Doctors Refuse to Treat Obese Women

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC I wish I could say I was surprised. After decades of assertions that judgmentalism has no place in medicine, we have recently seen advocacy for a return of such judgmentalism aimed at a different cadre of patients — specifically, the obese and smokers — based [...]

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Conscience Clauses: Obama Strips Medical Workers of Bush Protections

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Surprise, surprise — they did it on a Friday when potentially unpopular news is released to get lost in the weekend. It took longer than I thought it would — two years — but just as I predicted in my 2010 prognostications, the Obama Administration [...]

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Council of Europe Votes to Protect Medical Conscience

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC As you may know, I think one of the big coming fights in bioethics will be over “medical conscience,” that is, efforts to force Hippocratic and/or pro life doctors to participate in procedures or treatments that involve the taking of human life. Since the ethics [...]

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What It Means to be Human: Promoting Conscience Clauses

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC The newest edition of my podcast What It Means to be Human concerns the need to legally protect the consciences of Hippocratic physicians and other health care professionals. As I have stated repeatedly, this is going to be one of the biggest bioethical issues in [...]

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