Involuntary Suicide? Melinda Selmys Orriginally published in Issue XXII of Vulgata, Nov. 2009

Since the beginning of the Obama administration, pro-life groups have consistently raised concerns that protection of conscience laws may be weakened, allowing for pro-life individuals or organizations to be forced into providing services that offend against invididual conscience. Although Obama has stated that conscience protection will be included in any health reform, he has proposed to rescind the Bush administration’s regulatory conscience clause protection for health care providers, which strengthened existing conscience protection legislation.

In Canada, conscience protection has been suffering for some time; it is not uncommon for pharmacists or hospital workers to lose their jobs if they refuse to dispense the morning after pill, or to assist in abortions. According to pharmacist and bioethicist Cristina Alarcon, “If Americans want to see what is going to happen, they can just look over the border. In Canada, although the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to protect freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as well as freedom of expression, healthcare professionals are increasingly being pressured by licensing authorities to provide all legal products and services.” (MercatorNet, 2009)

A recently surfaced document from the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia suggests that in the future the removal of conscience protection may extend beyond contraception and abortifacients. According to a March/April 2000 bulletin from the College, leaked by Mike Izzoti of Pharmicists for Life, “Individual pharmacists may experience conscience problems when requested to provide services to which they have a moral objection. At present these services might include provision of contraceptives, syringes and needles to drug addicts, emergency contraceptives, high doses of narcotics to control intractable pain that might hasten death in the terminally ill, and medications for terminal sedation. In future these services might expand to include preparation of drugs to assist voluntary or involuntary suicide(sic), cloning, genetic manipulation, or even execution.” The document goes on to conclude that, “The moral position of an individual pharmacist, if it differs from the ethics of the profession, cannot take precedence over that of the profession as a whole. The public cannot be expected to consider it to be just bad luck if patients are refused recognized pharmacy services because their pharmacists have moral objections to providing them.”

The full text of the document can be found here.