Family & Life

Doctors’ Conscientious Objection Under Threat : 13th Apr 08

Doctors’ Conscientious Objection Under Threat—Crisis Pregnancy Agency Under Scrutiny over Abortion Referral

What would you think of a doctor, say in the Netherlands, who, when asked to supply a suicide drug, replied that, while he was against euthanasia, he would give the name of another doctor who had no such problem? What would you say if he claimed that he was obliged by the law to do this? Wouldn’t you condemn such a law that forced doctors to violate their conscience and to participate in an evil action by referral?

Medicine has always been a high-minded profession in the service of others. Doctors are not just medical technicians for hire, ready to give for a fee what their customers desire. They operate in a highly ethical environment, and their right and duty to act according to their conscience has been traditionally recognised. This ethical feature inevitably caused tension, even 24 centuries ago when Hippocrates wrote his famous Oath. Then, the rich and the powerful looked to their physician for poisons to kill their enemies, and their wives and daughters came asking for potions to rid themselves of an unwanted pregnancy.

Some things never seem to change. What are we to make of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency instructing general practitioners and crisis pregnancy counsellors that they have an obligation of “appropriate referral”. According to two publications carrying the CPA’s joint authorship, if a woman requests the contact details of a foreign abortion clinic (“Act Information”) and the GP has an ethical problem with this, then he has a legal obligation to give her the name of another doctor who has no problem with facilitating an abortion.

Again, in 2007 during its long-running dispute with CURA, the major issue of disagreement was “appropriate referral”. The CPA insisted that CURA was bound to refer such a client to an abortion-facilitating agency, since it was unwilling to give her “Act Information”.

Only last month, the CPA and the HSE jointly sent a directory to all the country’s GPs called KeyContact: Responding to Crisis Pregnancy. Under the section “Abortion and Law”, the directory gives an interpretation of the Abortion Information Act (1995) that contains a number of errors. The most important of which is the claim that this law requires doctors with a conscientious objection to abortion to refer a client to another “service provider who will give her this information”.

This is a major error. Neither the Freedom of Information referendum (the 14th Amendment to the Constitution) nor the Abortion Information Act gives any support to this interpretation. Section 13 of the Act states the opposite, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as obliging any person to give Act information”, and makes no reference to referral anywhere.

This concerted effort of the CPA and the HSE should be recognised as a violation of a doctor’s right to act according to his conscience as well as a serious misinterpretation of Irish law. Moreover, it is an attempt to undermine the right to conscientious objection to a course of action that a doctor regards as evil. Referral of this kind is co-operation in an immoral action, and making it part of a duty of care is an attack on the primacy of conscience. By David Manly in The Irish Cathoilic, April 3. David Manly is the editor of Personal Update, a publication of Family & Life.

Send this news story to a friend

Family & Life

Doctors’ Conscientious Objection Under Threat : 13th Apr 08

Recent Topics