Should Conscientious Objection Be Legal - 1789 Words

An issue of concern to many healthcare professionals is how much power they have to refuse patients care using conscientious objection as grounds to avoid doing procedures, prescribing medications, or in the pharmacists’ case even simply filling a medication that goes against their personal beliefs or ethical values. This paper is written to defend a moderate stance that healthcare professionals do have the right to use conscientious objection in the instance that something is physically required of the physician to preform that is against their ethical standards but do not have the right in lesser situations. To put it practically, a physician has rights to conscientious objection but perhaps the right is limited in majority of the†¦show more content†¦The areas I will be using to justify the previous statement are emergency contraceptives or contraceptives in general, abortion, and physician-assisted suicide. To begin I will start with addressing concerns of emergency contraceptives which appears to have a major argument that Card has stated, â€Å"presents a serious challenge to the moderate view†, which is as follows: Referring the patient to another willing pharmacist certainly does not remove the pharmacist from the causal chain of events that leads to the use of EC, an act that is often considered morally wrong by such objecting pharmacists. Supporters of pharmacists’ right to conscientious objection such as Karen Bauer, hold that such medical treatment violates the Hippocratic Oath by doing harm to human life. Brauer defends pharmacists’ rights to refuse to dispense medications themselves as well as to refuse to dispense medications themselves as well as to refuse to refer customers to other willing pharmacists. Brauner holds this position because she believes that referring customers makes no intrinsic moral difference†¦ A staunch defender of pharmacists’ right to conscientious objection clearly sees no ethical difference between dispensing the