CONSCIENCE COERCION: REPRESSION OF THE DOCTORS

Should doctors have the right to deny performing procedures that they believe are unethical? Many now believe that doctors should be coerced or be dismissed:

·       Two bioethicists known for their pro-euthanasia views have published an academic paper calling for a ban in Canada on doctors’ rights to conscientious objection… Queen’s University bioethicist Udo Schuklenk teamed with Oxford counterpart Julian Savulescu to argue that doctors have no right to refuse to provide abortions, contraceptives, or euthanasia on moral grounds to patients who request these “services,” reported the National Post. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bioethicists-rebuked-after-calling-for-ban-on-doctors-conscientious-objecti

According to these two bioethicists:

·       “Doctors must put patients’ interests ahead of their own integrity… If this leads to feelings of guilty remorse or them dropping out of the profession, so be it…There is an oversupply of people wishing to be doctors.”

They also propose that medical schools should screen out candidates who would refuse to comply with policy on moral grounds.

There are many problems with their proposals, some even terrifying. It would mean that your doctor’s first allegiance is not to doing the good and to patient care but to the institution. Consequently, it is not a matter of putting “patients’ interests ahead of their own integrity” but a matter of putting interests of the institution before all else.

Do we want our doctor to be an institutionalized clone of the system or someone whose first concern is for our welfare? Institutional clones have not proven good friends or caring neighbors. It is also doubtful that they would make good doctors. Once the system lobotomizes the conscience, we are left with a robot, a mere shell of a human being.

Must the conscience be removed like a cancerous tumor? It is certainly not necessary for the welfare of the State, as history has amply demonstrated. The protection of such human rights and the thriving of the West have proven to be a viable marriage. Once such protections are eliminated, so too is thriving and everything else we have valued in the West.

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, commented:

·        “When I’m at my lowest time in my life, I don’t want my doctor to be thinking, ‘If I don’t kill this guy or send him to someone who will kill him, that I’m going to lose my medical license. I want my doctor to look me in the eye and say, ‘I’m not going to do this.’”

·       They “want their doctors to be computers. Someone can go up, put in their order and they can get what they want. But to me that’s a ridiculous situation. Human beings should never be treated like computers, nor are they like that.”

While institutionalization and standardization are sometimes advisable, too much micro-management, conformitization, and control can kill, especially when they attempt to remove the conscience. When we treat people like conscience-less computers, they begin to act like them. (They can also rebel creating costly outcomes.) When we dismantle their conscience, we make them into zombies, and zombies are not the ideal life-forms.

We also have to wonder why these two bioethicists insist doctors must be coerced to conform to the system. While it is obvious that now the system’s “progressiveness” is in harmony with their own vision, will they still be smiling when this same coercive and repressive system adopts a vision at odds with their own? They want to put a loaded gun in the hands of the State but do not consider the possibility that this same gun might soon be later aimed at them.

They want to purge non-conforming doctors from practicing. However, these bioethicists do not consider that they might be the next Gulag exiles, so commonly the fate of the comrades of the Revolution.