I want to talk to you today about conscientious objection in healthcare.

And as you may be aware, there's quite a debate going on now in medical ethics

about whether doctors should have a moral or legal right to decline to perform treatments

like abortion or contraception or physician-assisted suicide, etc.

So what I wanted to talk to you about is basically the main objections that are raised against conscientious objection.

In other words, the main reasons that people give doctors should not have a

right to refuse to provide whatever treatment. And so basically, the toxin me divided into three

different parts. They need to talk about objections from rights of patients. And secondly,

objections from consequences. And thirdly, objections from alleged inconsistencies.

So those are the three kinds of parts.

So the first part is objections from the rights of patients.

And rights are typically divided in two different categories.

Moral rights on the one hand and legal rights on the other hand.

And so if we think about objections in terms of legal rights, at least the United States,

there is, currently, a legal right of health care providers to refuse to provide certain treatments.

So in 1973, right after Roeb v. Wade was handed down on the Supreme Court, the U.S. Congress

passed laws that basically protected health care providers, doctors, and nurses, from being

forced to perform abortions.

So basically the current law is that if you're a pro-life doctor or a nurse, you do not have a

legal obligation to do that sort of put in different terms. No patient has a legal right to force

a pro-life physician to, for instance, perform abortion.

Similar protections are in place for physician-assisted suicide,

...