Charo on Medical Professionals Who Refuse to Deliver Medical Care
Prof. Alta Charo, Elizabeth S. Wilson – Bascom Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has just published a perpective piece in The New England Journal of Medicine entitled The Celestial Fire of Conscience — Refusing to Deliver Medical Care. Here’s an excerpt:
Apparently heeding George Washington’s call to “labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience,” physicians, nurses, and pharmacists are increasingly claiming a right to the autonomy not only to refuse to provide services they find objectionable, but even to refuse to refer patients to another provider and, more recently, to inform them of the existence of legal options for care.Largely as artifacts of the abortion wars, at least 45 states have “conscience clauses” on their books — laws that balance a physician’s conscientious objection to performing an abortion with the profession’s obligation to afford all patients nondiscriminatory access to services. In most cases, the provision of a referral satisfies one’s professional obligations. But in recent years, with the abortion debate increasingly at the center of wider discussions about euthanasia, assisted suicide, reproductive technology, and embryonic stem-cell research, nurses and pharmacists have begun demanding not only the same right of refusal, but also — because even a referral, in their view, makes one complicit in the objectionable act — a much broader freedom to avoid facilitating a patient’s choices.
Visit the National Womens Law Center for more information on these state laws.