Extract I should like to question the right of a gynaecologist to refuse to do the work he is employed to do on grounds of moral prejudice. What would be the consequence, I wonder, if a surgeon refused to order blood transfusion on the basis of his beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness ? It is a well-accepted principle of medical ethics that treatment should not depend on race, colour, or creed of patient or doctor. I maintain, therefore, that it is clearly wrong for a person not prepared to perform abortions to follow a profession which requires him to do so.
Extract No doubt we could eventually be so conditioned that abortion, or the destruction of any other life too for that matter, gave no concern to our professional consciences. It is at least debatable whether any such alteration, not to say lowering, of our ethical standards would benefit either our patients or ourselves.
Extract There remain for consideration some general problems to which very little attention has so far been paid. It is necessary to distinguish (1) the law relating to abortion, (2) professional ethics relating to abortion, and (3) individual ethical standards. Hitherto (1) and (2) have coincided, in that an offence against the law relating to abortion has also been treated as an offence against professional ethics. Personal ethical standards, however, may differ from those of the law or of the profession as a whole. If the law is relaxed the General Medical Council will presumably have to consider whether professional ethical standards should be correspondingly relaxed. Individual judgements, however, may well show a much wider range than in the past, when doctors who were not opposed to abortion in principle were usually prepared to accept the standards laid down by the Bourne judgement. . . Doctors will, of course, remain free to exercise their own judgements in these matters, and the same must apply to the nurses and others who have to cooperate with them.
Extract In actual fact we know that many primitive tribes have practised abortion and child destruction for long periods. I suggest that Mr. Mills should examine the cultural origin of his feelings, then perhaps he would come to the conclusion that there are many occasions when termination of pregnancy would prevent many years of suffering, so that neither revulsion nor guilt need be felt.
Extract Nowadays therapeutic abortion is performed relatively rarely for organic disease, and the indications are largely psychiatric with often associated secondary social factors. Whilst some clarification of the old law may be necessary in order that all can understand the situation, we must beware lest in reframing the law this results in the opening of the floodgates in the demand for termination on more liberal grounds.
Extract It seems reasonable, therefore, to conclude that an increasingly large number of therapeutic abortions will be dealt with privately in the future. I am therefore perturbed that an attempt is being made to limit the activities of medical practitioners who are not in the N.H.S. I refer to the desire of Lord Dilhorne to make it necessary that at least one of the two doctors who will take responsibility for a therapeutic abortion must be in the N.H.S.
Extract [The following extract from an appreciation of the situation by the senior medical officer after 24 hours’ contact with the camp will serve to illustrate the state of affairs at the beginning.] . . .
. . .It has been found necessary due to the lack of doctors and nurses from home to employ German doctors and nurses. No doubt the additional medical skill thus added have proved beneficial in a general sense, but the patients are naturally terrified of being looked after by Germans even under supervision, remembering how they were tortured in the past. It has been established that patients were often given intravenous infusions of benzol and creosote by the German medical staff, so that now, when the doctors approach with hydrolysate for intravenous infusion, the patients often cry out begging not to be taken to the crematorium. . .
Conclusion This is a brief preliminary report of Belsen Camp to give the medical profession in Britain some idea of the medical problems involved. It is a complete understatement. No words can describe the stench of decaying faeces, rotting bodies, and burning rags, which in the first weeks one could begin to smell miles from the camp, and it can but be left to the imagination of the medical men who read this article to appreciate what the doctors, nurses, and students at Belsen have endured and accomplished. Since the camp was taken over from the Germans more than 20,000 internees have been buried; some 30,000 are left, of whom 11,200 are in the main hospital area. . . .
Extract . . . What to do with the hopelessly unfit? I had thought at a younger time of my life that the legalizing of euthanasia . . . Now my face is set against the legalization of euthanasia for any person, who, having been well, has at last become ill . . . But I am in favor of euthanasia for those hopeless ones who should never have been born-Nature’s mistakes.
. . . should the social organism grow up and forward to the desire to relieve decently from living the utterly unfit, sterilize the less unfit, and educate the still less unfit-then the Law must also grow, along with the amplitude of our new ideas for a wiser and better world, and fit the growing organism easily and well; and thereafter civilization will pass on and on in beauty.
Whilst agreeing in toto with your timely and forcible leader as regards the moral it indicates, yet do I take exception to certain statements therein contained. I object to the statement that it is petty sessional doings which have made Section ii of the Act-the conscience clause-a laughing- stock in so many parts of the country. The reason why it is not a laughing-stock in every part of the country is either because of the good sense or correct views of the inhabitants or because the antivaccinationists have neglected to disseminate their pernicious literature and to enforce their dangerous propaganda amongst these fortunate sections. . .
Extract Only this much have I suggested, that in view of that which is plainly a higher mandate; in view of the multiple miseries of the syphilitic infant and child, and its degenerate maturity; in view more especially of the fact that not upon us, but upon these miserable little creatures from whom we avert the mercy of abortion, the consequences of our interference fall, we should in all cases in which Nature is trying to cast off a syphilitic foetus thankfully allow her to do so.
