Dear ProLife Colleague: Check out our ad on page 48 of the current ObGyn News, the paper sent to every OB doc in the country. We do this ad yearly for the edition that is also given out at the ACOG’s ACM. Bring it to a prolife colleague’s attention. Our new website is up, and we are in process of correcting this and that on it! If you would like to have your name listed on our Webpage Physician Search, or if there is an error is the listing that exists, and you didn’t send a correction to us this month, please send your info, in this format: Name; city: office phone; office website. We’ll get it up this month. Where are we with the Conscience protection issue? That will likely be the seminal issue in our practice world for the foreseeable future. Following is information taken from the recent CMDA “News and Views:” Conscience Rights: CMA in Washington Post Excerpted from “New health-care law raises concerns about respecting providers’ consciences”. The Washington Post, by Rob Stein. May 11, 2010–Deep within the massive health-care overhaul legislation, a few little-noticed provisions have quietly reignited one of the bitterest debates in medicine: how to balance the right of doctors, nurses and other workers to refuse to provide services on moral or religious grounds with the right of patients to get care. The debate has focused attention on President Obama’s plan to rescind a federal regulation put into effect by the previous administration to protect workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable. Soon after taking office, President Obama announced he would lift the rule, arguing it could create obstacles to abortion and other reproductive health services. But a final decision about whether to kill, keep or replace the rule with a compromise has been pending as the debate over the health law raged. “At the end of the day regarding the legislation, a pro-life health-care professional is left with a weak and limited conscience provision that doesn’t even prohibit discrimination by governments and institutions,” said Jonathan Imbody, Vice President for Government Relations at the Christian Medical Association. # “The conscience battle often is not actually a conflict over physicians who ‘refuse to provide care’ but a conflict over forcing physicians to kill their patients—including the patient developing in the womb. Elective abortion and assisted suicide do not qualify as medical care by any historical medical standard; they are simply means of killing. # “Deadly procedures such as abortion and assisted suicide are not just procedures that some happen to ‘find objectionable,’ as if the conflict pits a physician’s subjective feelings against a patient’s physical needs. These lethal procedures violate life-honoring, objective standards (including the Hippocratic Oath and biblical commandments) that have guided medical ethics for millennia– AAPLOG COMMENT: Go to www.hippocraticregistry.com, read the info, and click on “register here” to sign on as a Hippocratic physician. That identity could become crucial as government approved “reproductive healthcare” (abortion) works it’s way into the mainstream standard of care. And if you would like copy of the Hippocratic Oath (2010 wording), just hit REPLY to this letter, and type in OATH. We’ll send it. We suggest you print it, sign it, frame it, and post it where your patients can see what you stand for. Jdc/aaplog
Menu
Menu