Extract The code means that a physician who has a conflict of interest between duty to a patient and personal belief shall refer the patient to someone who is not burdened by this conflict of interest, but the code states that a physician who has a conflict of interest between duty to a patient and personal belief shall refer the patient to someone who will provide the treatment the patient desires.
Extract Salaried physicians equal incompetent doctors? Certainly not! Quality medical care depends on a practitioner’s conscience, not the compensation method. . . One acquires professional ethics and satisfaction in one’s work. These things can also be lost, however. Whether the physician charges a fee for service or whether he is salaried, it is his professional conscience that remains his guide, his religion, his motto. . .
Extract Kordig denies that the dictates of one’s conscience are always either obligatory or morally permissible. With this thesis I have no quarrel. The recognition that a person’s conscience can be mistaken, sometimes dangerously so, is at least as old as Hobbes and has been maintained by philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Royce, and Nowell- Smith. Still, people do appeal to conscience in moral disputes and, as I will attempt to show, do so in a manner that is philosophically justifiable. My goal is not so much to attack what Kordig has said as it is to argue that his discussion is incomplete: some appeals to conscience are bogus but some are not.
Extract Statistics Canada has just released its detailed report of abortion in Canada for 1975. The report carries much more information than its predecessors. There are, for example, new sections on teenage abortions, sterilizations concurrent with abortions and associated complications, comparisons with abortion rates in other selected countries and gestation weeks by selected demographic and medical characteristics.
Extract [Author is president of Society of Obstetrics & Gynaecology Canada] To one who works in the field of therapeutic abortion, if not by choice, at least by necessity, the [Badgley] report makes fascinating reading and provides a wealth of information – a bonanza bargain at the cost. It is comparable to the 1974 Lane report from Great Britain. Chapter 2 of the report presents a most commendable summary of the therapeutic abortion situation in Canada. This is the underlying basis of the report from which the conclusions may be drawn for further recommendations with respect to therapeutic abortion. [Writer offers three recommendations for progress].
Extract Many people believe in conscience that a pregnant woman has supreme rights over what happens in her own body. Others believe in conscience that the right of the unborn child to life is as good as that of any other human being. In some countries, the law, in the name of the former right, discriminates against an obstetrician who, in the name of the latter, refuses to destroy that life. This is a serious contemporary issue which tests the sincerity of governments that profess respect for conscience.
Extract Within months [of legalization] physicians across Canada were beset by requests for therapeutic abortion in numbers they had never faced before. Some hospitals established abortion committees; others “did not. Some committees were liberal in their interpretation of the new law; others were restrictive. Soon facilities at many hospitals became overloaded owing to the increased demand for therapeutic abortion, and the waiting period for elective surgery grew longer. Hospital personnel were suddenly confronted with the prospect of caring for patients undergoing voluntary termination of pregnancy, and for some persons this was a difficult task, but they either accepted it or moved to other areas. . .
Helen Cvejic, Irene Lipper, Robert A Kinch, Peter Benjamin
Canadian Medical Association Journal
Extract We agree with Mr. Matthews that these are valid concerns to consider as part of the abortion experience; they are being expressed by physicians, theologians and patients. Nevertheless, we, with our limited ability and knowledge, considered it our responsibility to study the effect of abortion on the patients in an adolescent clinic population.
Extract The doctor-patient relationship is threatened. Once this association implied only one thing: the doctor above all must protect the patient. . . .
. . . it is not inconceivable that, as Canada moves towards socialized medicine and state control of all health facilities, we, too, may sacrifice the privacy of the doctor- patient relationship that we all once regarded as sacred.
. . . There is much concern regarding the involvement of medical personnel in the use of torture for political purposes. . .
. . . When the Dutch medical community refused to cooperate with the Nazi medical organization, 100 Dutch physicians were sent to concentration camps. Other Dutch physicians did not give in; they took care of the widows and orphans of their colleagues. They did not participate in any Nazi activity; they acted unanimously.
. . . Recently physicians in Portugal studied “the scientific effects” of torture; they examined persons before, during and after torture sessions and evaluated their ability to undergo further torture.
. . .We must therefore each ask what is our duty to our state and what to our profession and to our own sense of moral justice. To what extent might we unwittingly become agents of repression? . . . Physicians in Russia condone beatings; if the prisoner dies the physician complies with government policy and eliminates possible repression by signing the death certificate “cirrhosis of the liver.. or “coronary occlusion.”. . .
Extract Dr. Rapp’s distinction between human beings and “potential” human beings is mystifying. . . The fetus is not a “potential” human being; it is a human being with potential. . . the impetus for the mass killing of mental patients came not from the Nazis but from members of the medical profession. . . . the connection between abortion and euthanasia . . . is quite clear to other proabortionists [including] Joseph Fletcher, a member of the Euthanasia Education Council, and the late Dr. Alan Guttmacher, also a member of that council. . . Abortion and euthanasia are related by a common set of basic assumptions – that human life is not an absolute but rather a variable value that is socially determinable, and that it may be terminated. One form of euthanasia makes this particularly clear – the killing of the handicapped newborn. Arguments for abortion of mongoloid fetuses and mercy killing of mongoloid newborns are identical. . . .
