Dec 192008
CNN has a report about health care workers’ right to refuse to provide services, or information about services such as abortion, if it goes against their conscience. Not unreasonable, but it is also not unreasonable for patients to expect services according to their own beliefs, not the health care workers’.
Yet there seems to be a simple solution: health care workers should be obliged to disclose to patients their beliefs and the fact that they may be withholding specific information as a result of those beliefs. Health care workers may have a right to refuse to provide services or advice that they consider unethical, but patients also have a right to know that they are not receiving objective advice.