The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is currently revising its policy that allows doctors to refuse treatment to patients based on religious beliefs or moral grounds, as long as the situation is not life threatening. While many do not understand the need for any revision, others are concerned that a doctor should not be able to deny women contraception, abortion and other services because of his or her own homophobia, sexism or racism.
Carolyn McLeod, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, has been studying conscientious objections in health care and her team plans to submit their findings to the CPSO as a part of its reviewing. According to her, allowing doctors the right to deny treatment can prevent them from doing their jobs to the best of their potential. Furthermore, it is important for doctors to be able to differentiate between personal values and professional obligations, especially when it concerns the health of a patient.
She explained, “We argue that [doctors] need to provide referrals for health services that they morally object to [and] we talk about the importance of not demeaning or humiliating a patient while they’re refusing to provide the service the patient seeks.”
Many have also argued that with such discriminatory privileges, patients will no longer have the comfort of knowing they are being handled by doctors who truly care about their decisions and outcomes. For instance, if a doctor has biased beliefs that contradict the desires of a patient, then his or her treatment options will always be under the shadow of doubt. After all, medicine is a branch of science and all medical decisions must be based on scientific reasoning instead of on God’s will. So ideally, doctors should provide patients with suitable referrals if their ideologies do not seem to match.
Besides, patients expect doctors to know that they will be dealing with different kinds of people in their professional life and thus it is rather unreasonable for a medical professional to feel uncomfortable with what a patient demands from him or her.
The contention over doctors’ denying treatment to patients based on religious or moral grounds surfaced after 25-year-old Kate Desjardins requested the prescription of birth control at an Ottawa walk-in clinic in 2013 and was not given any. Reportedly, she was handed over a letter instead that explained how the doctor on duty would not provide contraception to patients “because of reasons of my own medical judgment as well as professional ethical concerns and religious values.”
Following this incident, Desjardins left the premises knowing in her rational mind that what she had just experienced was either illegal or a breach of professionalism but, to her shock, it was neither. As she discovered later, the longstanding policy of CPSO does in fact allow medical professionals across the country to deny treatment based on moral or religious grounds, as long as the patient is not in an emergency.
“I felt truly embarrassed having to leave in front of a group of people because of something that someone thinks is shameful and not right,” Desjardins wrote of the incident.
Desjardins’ experience is not a sole incident. Reportedly, two other doctors at the same clinic in Ottawa have refused the prescription of birth control pills in the past, as has a doctor in Calgary who was in the news a few weeks ago for doing the same. In fact, there have also been complaints of general physicians declining referrals to patients of doctors who will willingly offer the treatment they themselves won’t.
Marc Gabel, president of CPSO, said that his organization is evaluating the policy by a reasonable standard, the result of which will be known in August.
Photo Credit: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario
