Nancy Berlinger Archives - Protection of Conscience Project Library

Conscience Clauses, Health Care Providers, and Parents

Nancy Berlinger

Extract
Conscientious objection in health care always affects someone else’s health or access to care because the refusal interrupts the delivery of health services. Therefore, conscientious objection in health care always has a social dimension and cannot be framed solely as an issue of individual rights or beliefs. . . . Conscience rights are also limited by the foundational duty of care, which must be maintained through referrals and transfers so that a refusal to provide a service does not result in abandonment of a patient. . . Physicians who work in the 11 U.S. jurisdictions that permit terminally ill people, under certain conditions, to request a prescription of lethal medication with the goal of ending their lives may also have mixed emotions and intuitions about participating in medical aid-in-dying. . . Conscientious objection to providing or participating in certain activities on principle should not be used to avoid patient care that a professional finds stressful, or as a remedy for the common problem of moral distress.

Berlinger N. Conscience Clauses, Health Care Providers, and Parents [Internet]. Garrison, NY: The Hastings Center; 2022 May 31.

When Policy Produces Moral Distress: Reclaiming Conscience

Nancy Berlinger

Abstract
For too long, bioethics has followed law in reducing “conscience” to “conscientious objection,” in other words, to laws and policies permitting and protecting refusal. In “Reframing Conscientious Care: Providing Abortion Care When Law and Conscience Collide,” Mara Buchbinder and colleagues draw our attention to one dimension of the problem of reducing conscience to refusal to provide certain forms of medical care: what about the conscience problems experienced by the professionals who are attempting to provide safe, effective health care that includes services that others associate with conscientious objection? In seeking to disrupt a specific medical practice – one that is legal, desired by the patient, and conducted in accordance with medical standards – North Carolina House Bill 854, The Women’s Right to Know Act, and laws like it, appear to be designed to produce moral distress in physicians and other professionals involved in the provision of abortions. For abortion providers in North Carolina and other states, conscientious objection to the mandates of laws like HB 854 isn’t a realistic option. So what can bioethics offer to professionals bound by such laws? We can start by reclaiming the idea of “conscience” as something that can say “yes” to providing health care.

Berlinger, N. (2016), When Policy Produces Moral Distress: Reclaiming Conscience. Hastings Center Report, 46: 32–34. doi: 10.1002/hast.547

Martin Luther at the Bedside

Nancy Berlinger

Extract
Media coverage of conscientious objection tends to cast the refusing health care provider in the role of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms: Here I stand, I can do no other (emphasis on the “I”). Commentators also do this, parsing the rights and responsibilities (but mostly the rights) in a dyadic relationship: Providers versus patients. Paternalism versus autonomy. “I believe” versus “I want.” . . .

Conscientious objection in medicine is not merely a right to be invoked at the bedside, nor a problem to be held in check through a pro forma conscience clause. Rather, [David H] Smith reminds us, openly discussing the nature of providers’ moral objections, while keeping the needs of the suffering person
uppermost, is a “difficult and unglamorous” communal
responsibility of “morally serious people.” Amen.

Berlinger N. Martin Luther at the Bedside. Hastings Cent Rep. 2007;37(2).