Protection of Conscience Project
Protection of Conscience Project
www.consciencelaws.org
Service, not Servitude

Service, not Servitude
International Legal Commentary

International Legal Commentary

The commentaries provided on the website are not a substitute for legal advice provided by a qualified professional. 


Growing Intolerance Threatens Rights of Conscience of Health Care Workers

  • Lynn Wardle  | Around the world, policies and actions of many governments and governmental agencies are threatening rights of conscience of health care providers and employees.  These challenges and dangers seem to be increasing.

    Recent times have seen numerous high-profile incidents in which nurses, doctors, hospital staff, government employees, and other health care workers are being pressured, required and forced to provide morally-controversial elective procedures (such as non-therapeutic abortions) despite their expressed moral objections to participating in such services.
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Doctors' Orders

  • Michael A. Fragoso  | . . . conscience itself is not a moral or religious belief; it is a rational faculty that allows us to apply our religious or moral beliefs. If professional organizations and governments wish to force physicians to violate their own consciences, they are not forcing them to violate their religious tenets or moral beliefs, but rather their very moral compasses implicit in their rationality. . .
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Conscientious Objection as a 'Crime Against Humanity' 

  • Sean Murphy  | . . .Readers of Canadian Health Law and Policy are to be persuaded that a health care worker who declines, for reasons of conscience, to direct a patient to the morning after pill or abortion commits the offence of "forced pregnancy." . . . if . . . not actually a crime against humanity analogous to torture, . . . at least a gross violation of human rights that ought to be prosecuted by human rights commissions. . .
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Western Defense of Conscience:
Interview With Law Professor Rafael Navarro-Valls

  • Zenit | The right to conscientious objection -- in areas ranging from health care to education -- is one of the most important legal battles being fought in the West, according to a law professor and author on the subject. . .
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The "Medical Conscience" Civil Rights Movement

  • Wesley J. Smith  Until recently, healthcare was not culturally controversial. Medicine was seen as primarily concerned with extending lives, curing diseases, healing injuries, palliating symptoms, birthing babies, and promoting wellness - and hence, as a sphere in which people of all political and social beliefs were generally able to get along. That consensus has been shattered. Doctors today may be asked to provide legal but morally contentious medical interventions such as sex selection abortion, assisted suicide, preimplantation genetic diagnosis of IVF embryos, even medications that inhibit the onset of puberty for minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria. As a consequence, medical practice has become embroiled in political and cultural conflict. . .
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