GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Savulescu calls for ban on doctors’ conscientious objection

domingo, 28 de agosto de 2016

BioEdge: Savulescu calls for ban on doctors’ conscientious objection

Savulescu calls for ban on doctors’ conscientious objection

by Xavier Symons | 25 Aug 2016 | 1 comment

As politicians in the Australian state of Queensland debate controversial abortion laws, Oxford’s Julian Savulescu is calling for a ban on “conscientious objection at the bedside”.

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday, Savulescu was quoted as saying:

“When a medical procedure, or one which doctors have a monopoly over, is desired by the patient, in the patient's interests, and is a legal and reasonable use of limited resources, then that procedure ought to be provided by doctors…There is no place for conscientious objection at the bedside in these circumstances.”

In a provocative 2006 article in the BMJ, Savulescu argued that conscientious objection could lead to “bigoted, discriminatory medicine”, and that in some cases punitive measures should be taken against conscientious objectors.

The Australian bioethicist will deliver a lecture on the topic at Queensland University of Technology's Australian Centre for Health Law Research this Tuesday, and will also present at a special workshop on conscientious objection on Friday at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/savulescu-calls-for-ban-on-doctors-conscientious-objection/11980#sthash.a5skNuLc.dpuf

I must be getting old. For most of my life, I have been reading about the global need to curb births and the unmet demand for contraception. And then I opened this week’s edition of The Economist and discovered that the main problem facing couples is the unmet demand for children.

The Economist surveyed 19 countries, asking people how many children they wanted and how many they expected to have. The results were astonishing.

“For more and more couples, the greatest source of anguish is that they have fewer children than they want, or none at all. … In every rich country we surveyed, couples expect to be less fertile than they would like, and many in developing countries suffer the same sorrow….

“The pain of having no or fewer children than you desire is often extreme. It can cause depression and in poor countries can be a social catastrophe. Couples impoverish themselves pursuing ineffective treatments; women who are thought to be barren are divorced, ostracised or worse.”

I hope that executives at Marie Stopes International (see article below), the United Nations Population Fund and all the other global agencies dedicated to shrinking family sizes read The Economist’s advice:

"Governments and aid agencies have turned family planning into a wholly one-sided campaign, dedicated to minimising teenage pregnancies and unwanted births; it has come to mean family restriction. Instead, family planning ought to mean helping people to have as many, or as few, children as they want."