Jeffrey Blustein Archives - Protection of Conscience Project Library

When Doctors Break the Rules: On the Ethics of Physician Noncompliance

Jeffrey Blustein

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics

Abstract
Avoiding complicity in injustice is not limited to engaging in acts of noncompliance on behalf of one’s patients. The injustices from which one’s patients suffer may be rooted in morally suspect norms to which the profession of medicine, or some influential part of it, has lent its support or that it has not opposed and from which it and its practitioners have benefited. There may also be injustices that the profession has condemned but that remain. In general, avoiding complicity in wrongdoing involves, as a base- line, understanding that the norms and practices responsible for it have contributed to making noncompliance an option that at least deserves serious moral consideration, if not endorsement. A physician may then decide to engage in some form of rule breaking in order to act on this understanding and express her refusal to be complicit.. . .Complicity threatens the moral and professional integrity of the physician, and noncompliance may be warranted in part because it is the only way that a physician can meet the threat.

Blustein J. When Doctors Break the Rules: On the Ethics of Physician Noncompliance. Camb Q Healthc Ethics. 2012;21(02):249-259.

(Correspondence) Infertility Treatments for Gay Patients?

Jeffrey Blustein

Extract
an egalitarian justice argument, he mentions only briefly as more promising than the former: refusing to provide reproductive assistance to homosexual parents while making it available to heterosexual parents constitutes unjust discrimination against the former. Appel does not develop this suggestion at all, but I want to say a word about an issue on which it hinges, namely, the moral standing that reproductive assistance has in a just health care system.

Blustein J. (Correspondence) Infertility Treatments for Gay Patients? Hastings Cent Rep. 2006;36(5):6.

The Pro-Life Maternal-Fetal Medicine Physician: A Problem of Integrity

Jeffrey Blustein, Alan R Fleischman

Abstract
If the practice of maternal-fetal medicine sometimes results in abortion, can a physician strongly opposed to abortion maintain his own integrity and still practice in this field? . . . In the final analysis, we are not persuaded that a physician with strong pro-life convictions can be a participant in the practice of maternal-fetal medicine without betraying her or his integrity. We respect the attempts of thoughtful pro-life maternal-fetal physicians to reconcile their deeply held moral or religious beliefs with their profession’s standards of care, but it may be best for all concerned if individuals with strong objections to abortion avoided the practice of modern perinatal medicine.

Blustein J, Fleischman AR. The Pro-Life Maternal-Fetal Medicine Physician: A Problem of Integrity. Hastings Cent Rep. 1995;25(1):22-26.

Doing what the Patient Orders: Maintaining Integrity in the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Jeffrey Blustein

Extract
Conclusion
Physicians’ appeals to conscience, understood as fear of loss of integrity, should not be taken lightly. Integrity provides the basis for a unified, whole, and unalienated life, and its moral value, while dependent on the presence of other good traits in the agent, is not reducible to them. . . a physician can consistently be concerned about his or her own integrity without claiming to know better than the patient what is in the patient’s best interests. . . . The conception of integrity I have proposed . . . allows for the possibility of integrity-preserving compromise. . . . I have also considered the common practice of patient referral from the standpoint of physician integrity, and asked whether a physician who refuses to treat a patient as a matter of conscience can consistently refer the patient to another physician for the same treatment. . . in a dispute between physicians and their patients, there may be other values and principles at stake than the ones expressed in their conflicting positions, and a physician might well decide that referral in such a case is an appropriate response to a morally complex situation.

Blustein J. Doing what the Patient Orders: Maintaining Integrity in the Doctor-Patient Relationship. Bioethics. 1993;7(4):289-314.