There have been in recent years, there's been an escalating drumbeat of calls for the profession

to, the profession of medicine and the state to rein in what had come to be called conscientious

refuges or conscientious objections.

More than a decade ago, the biologist Julian Savulescu, who heads up a center at Oxford,

wrote in the British Medical Journal that a doctor's conscience has little place in the delivery of modern medical care,

and that if people are not prepared to offer legally permitted, efficient, and beneficial care to a patient because it puts with their values.

They should not be doctors.

A few years later, the American Congress of Obstetrics and

Diacology, known as ACOG, issued a position statement holding that

providers, their language, have a, quote, fundamental duty to enable patients to make decisions for themselves.

In spring of 2017, the New England Journal of Medicine, a local journal here, published an essay by Ronite Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel.

You may remember that Dr. Emanuel was the most prominent physician in the Obama administration.

And in that, they asserted that health care providers, in their language,

quote, have a primary interest to promote the well-being of patients, end quote.

This defines what they call the physician's role morality,

and adhering to that morality,

means, in their terms, quote,

offering and providing accepted medical interventions

in accordance with patients' reasoned decisions.

And in January 2018 and again last May federal courts in Ontario upheld a new rule that comes

out of the College of Physician and Surgeons there which has the authority of

the law party of the state behind it, a rule that requires physicians

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