Last month, Wesley Smith, the well-known writer and lawyer who opposes assisted suicide and abortion, wrote an article titled “Bioethicist Wants to Morally Cleanse Medical Schools” about plans to weed out pro-life potential doctors and nurses from even entering medical and nursing schools:
“Make no mistake. Schuklenk and his ilk — such as the adamant opponent of medical conscience, Ezekiel Emanuel — are deadly serious about crushing all dissent within the medical professions to emerging cultural paradigms, and plan to morally cleanse the ranks of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and institutions of all wrong thinkers, particularly of the religious and pro-life kind.”
As Wesley warns after speaking with such prospective medical and nursing students, “such culling already occurs outside of official policy”.
CONSCIENCE RIGHTS FOR HEALTH CARE INSTITUTIONS
Now health care institutions that forbid their employees from participating in abortion and euthanasia are at risk.
As an October 29, 2019 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) titled “Colorado End-of-Life Options Act-A Clash of Organizational and Individual Conscience” explains, a new court case may result in conscience rights being legally upheld when a doctor agrees to help a patient commit assisted suicide against a religious healthcare institution’s policy.
This came about when the Colorado legislature could not pass a physician-assisted suicide in 2014 and 2015 but a new, problematic referendum was introduced and passed by Colorado voters in 2016.
While hospitals and clinics in other states with assisted suicide laws are allowed to prohibit their employees from participating, the Colorado, the referendum added a little-noticed provision in the 2016 Colorado referendum that stated:
“A health care facility may prohibit a physician employed or under contract with the facility from prescribing medication to an individual who intends to use the medication on the facility’s premises. The facility must provide advance written notice of its policy to the physician and its patients. A health care facility may not discipline a physician, nurse, pharmacist, or other person for actions taken in good faith or for refusing to participate in any way.” (Emphasis added)
As the JAMA article notes, “This provision virtually guaranteed the Colorado law would eventually be challenged”.
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This set up the current case “Mahoney et al v. Centura Health Corporation” involving Neil Mahoney, a Colorado man with advanced cancer, who wanted physician-assisted suicide and found geriatrician Barbara Morris, MD. Dr. Morris was willing to write the lethal overdose prescription. However, the religiously based Centura Health System where she was employed forbade participation in assisted suicide. Mr. Mahoney and Dr. Morris filed a lawsuit on August 21, 2019 and the doctor was fired on August 26 for violating the ethical directives provided for Catholic health care services.
The article concludes that:
“the case seems destined to have a potentially significant effect on national policy. If the courts rule that the Constitution allows hospitals to exert control over individual physicians’ claims of professional conscience, it will be a victory for corporate medicine.
But if the state law is upheld, the case could establish that physicians’ professional conscience claims hold or take precedence over the ethical and religious directives of religiously affiliated hospitals. It is possible that at least some religiously affiliated health systems might rather close than allow that outcome.” (All emphasis added)
CONCLUSION
As Wesley Smith writes, eliminating pro-life health care providers and institutions is becoming part of an utilitarian agenda in the bioethics movement where “legalized euthanasia, free and unfettered abortion at all stages of gestation, infanticide, eugenic embryo engineering, invidious forms of health-care rationing based on ‘quality of life,’ etc., are all part of the mainstream bioethics agenda, or at the very least, are seen as respectable advocacy memes.”
With the current support of a predominantly sympathetic mainstream media, well-funded and politically active groups like Planned Parenthood and Compassion&Choices are also putting pro-life health care providers and their supportive institutions in grave danger of becoming an endangered species in law, politics and health care.
If this happens, our health care system will radically change-especially for the unborn, the elderly and people with disabilities.
When dedicated and compassionate people are denied entry into the health care professions because they refuse to deliberately end lives, harassed and/or fired when they refuse to participate in a deliberate death decisions and religiously based healthcare institutions are forced by law to allow lives to be ended by “choice” or close their doors, will any of us be able to trust our healthcare system when we need it the most?
We need to educate ourselves and the public before it’s too late.
LifeNews Note: Nancy Valko, a registered nurse from St. Louis, is a spokeswoman for the National Association of Pro Life Nurses.
