The following is an article published in the Daily Telegraph by Cristina Odone
Euro-socialists want to shut down hospitals opposed to abortion and euthanasia. It's time to stop them
Socialists at the Council of Europe (yes, the same entity that brought you the European Convention on Human Rights) have been very busy lately. A Ms Carina Hagg of the Swedish Socialist Group and Ms Christine McCafferty of the UK Socialist Group are scheming to name and shame conscientious objectors in the medical profession who refuse to carry out abortions, hand out birth control devices or engage in euthanasia. McCafferty even suggests that European governments should set up a register of those who will not cut their conscience to suit the fashion of secular socialists. Daily Telegraph article by Cristina Odone
Conscience, once regarded as a positive asset, is seen by today’s Euro-socialists as a bigot’s charter to block abortion, birth control and euthanasia. Conscientious objection may be a universal human right under international law, but the right to medical intervention – even when it is to end life rather than sustain it – trumps faith every time.
This is dogma, and it is deadly. Conscientious objectors are not fanatics who want to force their religious views down others’ throats: their principled stands often protect the vulnerable, from the octagenarian to the unborn child.
Do you want to live in a world where a doctor cannot refuse to administer the lethal drug to the elderly patient whose gimlet-eyed heirs want out of the way? Where a doctor cannot refuse to terminate the healthy young married woman’s pregnancy, although she makes it clear the baby comes at an inconvenient moment in her career? Yet this is the new world, amoral and irresponsible, that Ms McCafferty seeks to impose on us. (Watch her in action here)
The “regulatory” framework she wants to push through would extend beyond individuals, to hospitals and clinics. This, in effect, would shut down any European medical institution with religious affiliations. The resulting scenario, in which all hospitals and all medics are uniform in their readiness to carry out anything demanded of them, may be a humanist utopia. For the rest of us, though, it spells the loss of some outstanding hospitals and clinics, and outstanding health professionals.
Don’t let the Council’s socialists bury freedom of conscience. Write to William Hague and protest about this soulless scheme. We need more medics with scruples, not fewer.
