Moral objections to medical procedures

Medical decisions should not be coloured by a doctor's personal beliefs

David Toub blogs about "compulsory abortion training" for OB/GYNs. He mentions that at Yale it is not compulsory for students to learn abortion procedures although they did have to learn how to handle post-abortion patients.

It sickens me to think that there are doctors in the world that may be (by hook or by crook) imposing their own moral views on their patients.

The idea that I would have to change doctors because mine refuses to perform a certain procedure on moral grounds seems to me like a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath which in theory involves providing the best care possible for a sick patient. It must be said that the original oath contained a clause that specifically forbade abortion; but that clause is absent from most modern versions of the oath.

Should a Jewish doctor be allowed to refuse to perform a porcine heart implant on the grounds that they do not believe that a pig's heart should be in a human body? Should any doctor refuse to perform a blood transfusion because they believe that their blood is their own and that to accept another's blood is to import impurities?

Science and scientists have always been on the razor edge of this knife: can I refuse to employ my knowledge because of a known outcome that I personally find reprehensible?

In many cases the answer is "yes". Engineers can decide to not build bridges that they believe will cause environmental damage, atomic physicists can refuse to build a better bomb, etc. But doctors, even more so than other scientists, are in the tricky business of directly saving lives.

To say that a doctor should be able to pick and choose which conditions he treats would be like saying that a policeman could pick and choose whom he protects; or like saying that a fireman could decide to not put out a fire based on what business took place in the building; or like a teacher being allowed to pick and choose which of his students he teaches.

When your profession places you in a position of responsability for the well-being of somebody else I think that your decisions for the treatment of that person (or that person's property in the case of the fireman) should be made based on the person's system of beliefs and not on your own. It's one thing for a doctor to advise against a certain operation (although the morality of the thing becomes very grey indeed) it's another entirely to relegate the patient to a lesser (or even just another) doctor just to satisfy one's own sense of moral values.

When somebody depends on you, putting them at risk to satisfy your own subjective reality can hardly be said to be the moral high ground.