Ethics Archives - Page 80 of 87 - Protection of Conscience Project Library

(Op/Ed) CMA anti-abortion

ADK

Canadian Medical Association Journal, CMAJ — Canadian Medical Association Journal

Summary
Page long comment by CMA official who encountered feminist pickets outside the CMA office accusing the association of being anti-abortion, accusing gynecologists of lying about legality of abortion and refusing to distribute contraceptives to the unmarried. Also demanding abortion on demand. “I hope that the demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement will not prevail, if for no more lofty reason than that the plight of doctors, nurses and hospitals would be worse than it is”.

ADK. CMA anti-abortion. Can Med Assoc J. 1970;102(13):1342.

(Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion

RN Borsch

Extract
The main purpose of my letter was to clarify what I thought was Dr. Coffey’s confusion between moral and religious issues on therapeutic abortion. . . . Hence that “infamous” third paragraph was not an argument in support of therapeutic abortion but a clearer definition of the moral issues involved. How Dr. Harrison was able to extrapolate the basically sociological data to include implied support of a euthanasia program against 270,000 mental defectives and Hitler’s subsequent genocide of Jews during World War II is totally beyond my comprehension.

Borsch R. (Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion. Can Med Assoc J. 1970;102(11):1209-1210.

(Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion

CP Harrison

Extract
The argument advanced in the third paragraph of Dr. R. N. Borsch’s letter (Canad. Med. Ass. 1., 102: 642, 1970) is very convincing; but so it was the first time it was used in the book “The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value”, published in Leipzig in 1920. . . I do not question that Dr. Borsch has a real concern for the human problem or his conviction about his beliefs. I do question, however, the wisdom of accepting a philosophical position which led to the atrocities in Nazi Germany..

Harrison CP. (Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion. Can Med Assoc J. 1970 May 30;102(11):1209.

(Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion

RN Borsch

Extract
However, he seems to have confused morality with the religious (and more specifically Roman Catholic) stand against destroying a living entity. Thus, his letter is an attempt to deal with the therapeutic abortion problem on religious grounds. . . I also take issue with Dr.Coffey’s comment that the medical indications for therapeutic abortion are ”mainly psychiatric.” Psychiatric indications are actually just as many as medical, which are few, if any. However, it is the psychiatrist who is thrust in the breach of the current legislation and must take liberties to interpret the law to fit his own patient. . .

Borsch R. (Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion. Can. Med. Assoc. J.. 1970;102(6):642. Available from:

(Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion

PG Coffey

Extract
. . . I can only touch on some of the reasons why I am opposed to therapeutic abortion. My main reason is a moral one, but first a word from a purely medical standpoint. It is being increasingly realized that medical indications for therapeutic abortion are few, if any, and that they are mainly psychiatric. But for every psychiatrist who would say that in a certain case the patient would benefit by having an abortion there would be another who would disagree and say that the long-term effect on the patient’s mind outweighed any immediate beneficial effect that the procedure might have. . . . My plea is that we as a profession not unwittingly commit a moral wrong which future generations of doctors will accept as the norm to the detriment of our human society. My contention is that when a doctor is caring for a pregnant women, he really has two patients on his hands even though one may be very tiny. Is it ever justifiable to kill one patient in the hope that it will improve the lot of the other?

Coffey P. (Correspondence) Therapeutic Abortion. Can Med Assoc J. 1970 Jan 17;102(1):90-91.

(Correspondence) Abortion Act Amendment

Norman Chisholm

British Medical Journal, BMJ — British Medical Journal

Extract
While claiming that there is no suggestion that any general practitioner be excluded from assessing that an abortion is necessary or desirable, what is being sought by the opponents of the Act in its present form is that one of the two doctors should be a consultant gynaecologist holding office in the N.H.S. . . By restricting the operation of ‘the Act to a minority of the profession, many of whom are opposed to it on religious and other grounds, will cripple it.

Chisholm N. (Correspondence) Abortion Act Amendment. Br Med J. 1969 Sep 27;3(5673):783. Available from:

The voice of conscience

L. McRedmond

McRedmond L. The voice of conscience. J Ir Med Assoc 1969 May;62(383):189-90 PMID:5770867

(Correspondence) Abortion Act in Practice

Myre Sim

Extract
The Act does not give Dr. Hughes the right to castigate those psychiatrists who, acting “in good faith,” are seriously in doubt as to whether an abortion is justified, and for good reasons know that support and treatment would be at least as effective as abortion in dealing with the problem be it-social or medical. They have ample clinical evidence- to support the ” good faith ” of their decisions . . .. It would be of great interest to see- what factual evidence could be produced to support the many decisions to abort under the present Act.

Sim M. (Correspondence) Abortion Act in Practice. Br Med J. 1969 Apr 5;2(5648):50-51.

Responsibility and Conscience

Lynne Belaief

Extract
In philosophical ethics, if one asks the question, is ethics possible, it is inconveniently, and, I will argue, erroneously assumed that he has also raised the notorious problem, what is the definition of “the good”? Various confusions attend the latter inquiry, including the remarkably ambiguous insistence that “the good” cannot be defined – implying that one in fact knew a great deal about its meaning in order to know this. I here intend to reject this typical but inconvenient quest principally because all such initial inquiries into the definition of “the good” are potentially important only within a particular ethical perspective, which is already therefore presupposed as true. The logic and ethical value of that perspective, here named legalistic or authoritarian ethics, is to be contrasted with the perspective called creative ethics, and discarded.

Belaief L. Responsibility and Conscience. Philos Today. 1969;13(1):60-79.

(Correspondence) Abortion Act in Practice

JH Hughes

Extract
The Abortion Act is the law of the land and has already proved of immense benefit to many of my patients. It is there to be used and to be applied uniformly throughout the country. It is the antagonism to abortion reform of many doctors, particularly N.H.S. consultants in certain parts of the country, that creates long queues for abortion. . . If all doctors, general practitioners and consultants, put their patient’s welfare before their own religious and biased cobwebbed ideas on abortion, then the new Act would present no problems at all..

Hughes JH. (Correspondence) Abortion Act in Practice. Br Med J. 1969 Mar 8;1(5664):637-638.