Right of Conscience for Health-Care Providers

Abstract

Health-care providers have been challenged by changes in medical practice to include abortion, euthanasia, and controversial fertility technologies. These procedures go beyond saving lives, healing disease, and alleviating pain, the traditional purposes of medicine. The foundational principles of Western medical ethics, as characterized by the Hippocratic Oath, have been weakened or even rejected. The consequences of abandoning the Hippocratic tradition are illustrated by the eugenics movement, the Nazi Holocaust, the Tuskegee experiments, and contemporary bioethics theories. Physicians and other health-care personnel are under institutional and governmental pressure to succumb to anti-Hippocratic ethics. Conscience clauses are a means of defending medical practitioners from these trends. Characteristics of conscience legislation that protect health-care providers are described. Strong conscience clauses also protect the public by ensuring the survival of healthcare personnel with shared Hippocratic values.

Letter to the editor: “Not all biases are bad: equitable and inequitable biases in machine learning and radiology”

“…Medicine is a branch of human science and is based on an ideal of neutrality. Regarding the social-related cognitive bias applying to radiologists facing inequities, we would like to refer to the original Hippocratic oath, i.e., ‘Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption’ [ 5 ]. Swearing this oath does not eliminate bias in social individuals (radiologists included), but we believe that physicians fundamentally respect this oath by treating all patients equally.…”

Conscience Clause in the Professional Practice of a Nurse and Midwife: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…The emergence of numerous new technologies in healthcare has complicated the choices that healthcare professionals and patients face [3]. In this respect there is the so called conscience clause, as an emanation and realization of the freedom of conscience, which is supposed to help resolve moral dilemmas, which are actually a con ict of [4]. Due to the dynamic development of nurse's and midwife's competences in recent decades, the legislation of individual countries has encountered the need for comprehensive regulation of the provisions on the rules of practicing the profession of a nurse and midwife, including the issue of de ning the legal framework of the conscience clause [1].…”