ACOG Preventing Doctors From Objecting to Abortions (via Life News.com)

by Michael Fragoso | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ABOG) are restricting opportunities for healthcare professionals to object to abortion and contraception on grounds of conscience. This will accelerate the growing problem of physician shortage.

Against the backdrop of current debates about health care and conscience protection, a federal judge for the District of New Jersey has issued a temporary restraining order against the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) that prohibits them from forcing twelve nurses to assist in abortions against their conscientious objections. While much has been written on medical providers’ conscience rights as a moral imperative and as a means of maintaining diversity within the profession, the potential relationship between conscience and the supply of medical providers–in particular, obstetric specialists and nurses–should make the issue salient to anybody interested in health care reform, especially those seeking to expand access and reduce costs.

The contours of physicians’ conscience rights and their correlative obligations have been contested for decades. Indeed, the last half century has seen profound changes in both the practice of medicine and the state of law that necessarily implicate the position of the physician vis-à-visthe patient and the procedures that the physician may be asked to provide. As Azgad Gold notes, increasingly “the medical field became more ‘subjective’ than ‘objective,’ as reflected by the shift to measuring outcomes of treatments by ‘quality of life’ parameters rather than the traditional objective ‘morbidity’ and ‘mortality’ parameters.” This, coupled with the liberalization of abortion following Roe v. Wade, has increased internal and external pressures on the medical field to see abortion as simply another valid medical choice to which the patient is subjectively entitled, regardless of the ethical–or medical–views of her attending physician.

Nevertheless mainstream medical ethics maintains that physicians have the right to refuse service to patients. It is a professional prerogative that covers everything from a disagreement over the soundness of a requested procedure to wanting to avoid notorious bill dodgers. Furthermore, on atraditional understanding, “hospital employees have the right to refuse to participate in performing an abortion, and a hospital cannot dismiss the employee for insubordination. An employee can abstain from assisting in an abortion procedure as a matter of conscience or religious conviction.”

On the other side of this debate, there is a sense that the principle of “patient autonomy” should be paramount, and what is conscientious objection to one person is burdensome refusal to another. Under this view,

The widely accepted ethical principle that patients are autonomous individuals with the right to make the final decisions concerning their medical care, along with the corresponding principle that appears in all medical professionals’ codes of ethics that the ‘patient’s interest comes first’ leads to the following general rule: patient care decisions should be based on patient autonomy, as mediated by the clinician’s conclusion that the requested therapy (1) is not medically contraindicated (since it is both medically effective and not considered unethical within the profession’s generally accepted concept of ethical practice) and (2) is not illegal. Read the rest at Life News.com http://www.lifenews.com/2011/12/06/acog-preventing-doctors-from-objecting-to-abortions/

December 6, 2011 | Categories: America, freedom, Life, people, pro life news, United States | Tags: abortion, American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Gynecologists, Health care, roe-v-wade, United States, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Wade | Leave A Comment »