A group of anti-abortion doctors has filed an application in the High Court at Auckland challenging new Medical Council guidelines on how physicians with personal objections to abortion must deal with patients. It is impressive that people are actually taking the time and effort to make a stand on these issues. It seems we, as a society, are moving more and more toward an attitude that abortion is just another form of contraception.

The application is for a judicial review of the “Beliefs and Medical Practice” guidelines. Their main objection is understood to involve a new section in the guidelines covering the way doctors who object to abortion must deal with patients. It requires them to tell patients having doubts about a pregnancy that abortion is one of the options. The statement was intended to guide medical practitioners, and tried to balance doctors’ and patients’ rights – including the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion – and the entitlement to care and treatment.

The thing that bugs me about decisions like this is that many doctors and people in healthcare positions of authority so obviously take the view that they are accommodating an irrational minority, but really all sane people have no problem with abortion. The mere statement that “doctors should set aside their own beliefs where necessary and that they must make the care of the patient their first concern.” is a very opinionated statement because it implies that aborting their baby may be in a person’s best interests – which could never be the opinion or advice of a doctor who knows the sort of depression and heartache people go through after they abort a baby, and much less in the interests of the other human being the doctor is looking after – the baby.

I have a few friends who are doctors and they generally find it too difficult to practice or specialise in areas of women’s health because of their beliefs. They are even apparently sometimes labelled unhelpful or even lazy by others within the hospital if they refuse to help with referrals for abortion or prescribing contraception.

The law already allows doctors to refuse to provide contraception or abortion services on grounds of conscience, although they must tell patients they can consult another physician. The draft guidelines say that regardless of their personal beliefs, doctors must ensure a pregnant woman having doubts about her pregnancy is told abortion is among the options available to her, and is given information on it and the other options.

Apparently the proposed guideline is this:

CCID: 27436
PROPOSED MEDICAL COUNCIL GUIDELINE

“While the council recognises that you are entitled to hold your own beliefs, it remains your responsibility to ensure that a pregnant woman who comes to you for medical care and expresses doubt about continuing with the pregnancy is provided with or is offered access to objective information or assistance to enable her to make informed decisions on all available options for her pregnancy, including termination.”

The more we normalise it for ourselves, the more it will become just that: normal. We don’t want to end up like China do we where girls lives are disregarded as lives worth nothing and often aborted or deprived of the necessities of life once born?? – because that’s the direction in which a lack of regard for life heads…

In a 2002 survey conducted in a central China village, more than 300 of the 820 women had abortions and more than a third of them admitted they were trying to select their baby’s sex.
According to a report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the vast majority of aborted fetuses, more than 70 percent, were female, citing the abortion of up to 750,000 female fetuses in China in 1999. Scary!