A legislative committee in Alberta, Canada, recently blocked a measure designed to protect physicians’ rights of conscience.
John Stonestreet with the Colson Center for Christian Worldview writes,
As one LGBT spokesperson said, “We really shouldn’t have been having this conversation in 2019.”
I guess that’s because religious liberty and freedom of conscience are so last-year.
To keep these pesky medical conscience bills from being necessary at all, one Canadian bioethicist suggested that would-be health professionals with religious or pro-life scruples shouldn’t be admitted into medical school in the first place!
As Udo Schuklenk told one Canadian website, “Medical schools, pharmacy schools, should go out of their way to basically eliminate applicants” who oppose such things as abortion and euthanasia. That’s because, he says, personal beliefs can’t trump patient well-being.
It may not raise too many eyebrows to see Canadian lawmakers refusing to enact conscience protections for doctors.
However, the Arkansas Legislature has failed to pass measures protecting healthcare workers’ rights of conscience two legislative sessions in row — once in 2017 and this year.
Conscience protections are important if for no other reason than the fact that without them we may end up with doctors who have no conscience at all. That’s a very sobering thought.
