Conscientious Objection: Resisting Ethical Aggression in Medicine

Abstract

Professor Julie D. Cantor implies that Americans have access to health care only because health care workers are compelled to provide services that they find morally repugnant.

Such anxiety is inconsistent with the fact that religious believers and organizations have been providing health care in the United States for generations. If anything, this demonstrates that health care is provided to many Americans - and many of the poorest Americans - because of the commitment of health care workers to their moral convictions, not in spite of them.

Professor Cantor appears worried that protection of conscience regulations will limit patient access to health care. If so, she offers a peculiar solution; people unwilling to do what they believe to be wrong should not become physicians or health care workers because they lack “selfless professionalism.” What Professor Cantor proposes as a “solution” to the problem of patient access to health care could drive as many as 90% of religious believers out of the field. Her “solution” could shut down over 900 Catholic hospitals and health care centres that served over 90 millions patients last year, to say nothing of other denominational facilities. How all of this will improve access to health care she does not explain.

The real history of health care in the United States has been made by hundreds of thousands of professionals with only one identity, served by a single conscience that governs conduct in private and professional life. This moral unity of the human person is identified as integrity, a virtue highly prized by Martin Luther King. Selflessness or self-sacrifice, in the tradition of King, might mean going to jail or losing one’s life, but has never been understood to include the sacrifice of one’s integrity.

From this perspective, to abandon one’s moral or ethical convictions in order to serve others is not “selfless professionalism,” but prostitution.

Keywords: freedom of conscience, health care, abortion, female circumcision, religion