There’s a flurry of papers on conscientious objection in the latest JME: Giles Birchley argues, taking his cue from Arendt, that conscientious objection has a place in medicine here; Sophie Strickland’s paper on medical students’ attitude to conscientious objection (which I mentioned in July) is here; and Morten Magelssen wonders when conscientious objection should be accepted here.
All this is coincident with the recent passing of the “Protection of Life” Bill by the American House of Representatives. This also has a significant clause about conscientious objection: I’ll come to that in a little while.
Magelssen claims that conscience is important for integrity, and there is a social interest in protecting integrity. His position is that objections should be accepted if
1. Providing health care would seriously damage the health professional’s moral integrity by (a) constituting a serious violation (b) of a deeply held conviction.
2. The objection has a plausible moral or religious rationale
3. The treatment is not considered an essential part of the health professional’s work
4. The burdens to the patient are acceptably small ((a) The patient’s condition is not life-threatening; (b) Refusal does not lead to the patient not getting the treatment, or to unacceptable delay or expenses (c) Measures have been taken to reduce the burdens to the patient)
5. The burdens to colleagues and healthcare institutions are acceptably small
As elaboration, he claims that “[a]n objection does not have a plausible rationale if it is based on erroneous factual premises”. I worry a little about this: some false statements are implausible (the insistence of the man who works down at the chip shop that he’s Elvis, for example), but others are not (“The Higgs Boson has a mass in the region of 300 GeV” is probably false, but was until recently – until we had a reason to believe it false – a perfectly plausible thing to say); still others are implausible but actually true (“An electron exists in all theoretically possible states simultaneously, but measurement will yield a result corresponding to just one of them”: hence Schrödinger’s cat paradox). It’s a slightly puzzling thing to say in respect of conscientious objection, too: there might be any number of religious positions that forbid doing A, even though they’re mutually incompatible and so, at most, only one can be true; but, presumably, if we take conscientious objection seriously, it doesn’t hinge on the actual truth of what a person believes. At the same time, how are we to deal with a person’s earnest statement along the lines that his religion forbids A, when other members of the religion disagree? It’s true that he believes it forbidden; we need to be able to separate the truth of “I believe this to be forbidden” and “This is forbidden”. Failure to do that would mean there’d be no way to work out what was plausible.
And, while it might be true of decent societies that they allow moral dissent (Magelssen talks about democracies, but I see no reason to suppose that you can’t have a decent non-democracy), I’m also a little wary of making too easy a leap from this to medicine. After all, you don’t get a choice about living in a society of some kind; but noone forces you to enter medicine, and even less are you forced to enter a particular speciality. If you object to, say, terminations, then it’s not crazy to suppose that you probably ought to stay out of obs and gynae, career-wise.
Birchley’s paper is concerned precisely about career dynamics, and claims that a right to object based on an ayenbite of inwyt is important in hierarchical institutions such as hospitals: it allow juniors to demur from the demands of their seniors, taking into account that those seniors might have become less likely to recognise legitimate ethical concerns over the course of the process of becoming senior. Thus
a right to object conscientiously protects individuals from participation in immoral acts they lack the institutional power to challenge effectively.
There’re aspects of the paper that seem uncomfortably close to Kass’ “wisdom of repugnance”, and so are likely to attract substantially the same kind of objection – especially the claim that the voice of conscience is not the voice of reason, and is not subordinate to it. The claim that “the revulsion that manifests in the voice of conscience is resolutely immune to reason” comes alongside a claim that that voice of conscience can still be challenged by reflection, and that “it is reflection on our experiences, rather than appeals to reason, that will provide that challenge” – but I’m unsure how mere reflection has any normative power: without some kind of regulator, all we’re saying is, “First I thought this, then I thought that, and I still do”. To go beyond that, you need something normative – and reason seems like a reasonable plug to fill the gap.
Anyway: on to the American legislation. The Bill states that
No funds authorized or appropriated by [the Paitient Protection and Affordable Care] Act … may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except–
(A) if the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest; or
(B) in the case where a pregnant female suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the female in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.
The Paitient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a major plank of Obama’s healthcare reforms. That the provisions outlined above have been suggested isn’t really much of a surprise. However, the PL Bill continues to require that
A Federal agency or program, and any State or local government that receives Federal financial assistance under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), may not subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, or require any health plan created or regulated under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) to subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, on the basis that the health care entity refuses to–
(A) undergo training in the performance of induced abortions;(B) require or provide such training;
(C) perform, participate in, provide coverage of, or pay for induced abortions; or
(D) provide referrals for such training or such abortions.
Life Site News talks about this clause in terms of “strengthened conscience rights for health care providers”; CNS News frames it in terms of “protect[ing] health care providers who are opposed to abortion for moral or religious reasons”. A cursory reading might lead us to interpret this as a fairly common-or-garden conscience clause; but what’s important not to forget is that not all terminations of pregnancy are elective: some of them are required in order to save the life of the pregnant woman.
For this reason, there would seem to be a coherent moral position that says that it’s one thing to allow people to opt out of performing elective terminations; but quite another to allow them to opt out of performing any terminations whatsoever, or to opt out of training in how to provide them. You might think that the deliberate ending of a human life for elective reasons has no place in medicine; but even if you do think that, it’s a long way from thinking that the equivalent procedure in an emergency situation has no place in medicine. Yet the Bill does seem to allow medics to refuse to participate in terminations even when the mother’s life is at stake. And so it’s not a common-or-garden conscience clause after all.
Ophelia Benson notes that “the legislation would make it legal for health care providers – including hospitals, not just individuals – to refuse to do abortions even to save the woman’s life”, and enjoins us to “[n]otice the complete failure to mention that this ‘strengthening’ means legalizing the refusal to do an abortion to save a woman’s life“. I think she’s on to something; and it’s in this sort of context that Magelssen’s paper is troubling. As I just suggested, it’s not obvious that someone who voluntarily goes into medicine can legitimately claim the kind of “protection” that the Bill provides: granted that sometimes saving a life may require terminating a pregnancy (and there’re even Catholic theologians who’ll accept the permissibility of removing an innocent threat), not to learn how to do it seems like a massive dereliction of duty, and not one that’s easy to square with the ethos of medicine. And if you’re working in a discipline where you’re tolerably likely to have to perform a termination, but object to doing so… well, you’ve chosen the wrong discipline. Maybe dermatology or nephrology or immunology would be more up your street.