COMPAS COLLOQUIUM: Conscientious Objection in Medicine

Do doctors and other health care professionals have a right to refuse to perform certain medical procedures, or to treat certain patients, based on their religious or moral beliefs? Should so-called “conscience laws” enabling them to do so be passed? These questions touch on some of the most sensitive areas of contemporary medicine, including end-of-life care, abortion and in vitro fertilization, contraception, and the treatment of LGBT persons. Join us for a conversation between two leading experts who take opposing sides on the issue.

 

Abraham Nussbaum is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado and Chief Education Officer at Denver Health. He is the author of The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine, a memoir about practicing medicine in an era of healthcare reform recently published by Yale University Press.

 

Ronit Y. Stahl is a fellow in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and the co-author, with Ezekiel Emanuel, of "Physicians, Not Conscripts: Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

 

Dana Howard (moderator) is a member of the The Ohio State University Center for Bioethics. Dana’s work focuses on ethical issues that surround medical decision-making, especially the decisions made on behalf of those who cannot decide on their own. She also focuses on the norms of advising and the role that our anticipatory attitudes like hope and retrospective attitudes like regret should play in our decision-making.