Conscience Rights

 

Pro-abortionists campaign relentlessly to eliminate the right of conscience

By Dave Andrusko

Joyce Arthur, executive director, Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada

I won’t belabor the obvious gigantic inconsistency/hypocrisy: “pro-choicers” who are adamant that no physician have the right to choose not to be involved in abortions.
Nor will I talk (again) about a different phase of the battle over the right of conscience: the refusal to be conscripted by the Obama Administration’s HHS mandate which compels employers to provide health coverage for drugs and procedures to which they have moral or religious objections.
The Supreme Court has heard “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby” and “Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius” and is expected to deliver a decision next month.
Instead I’ll just talk about “Why We Need to Ban ‘Conscientious Objection’ in Reproductive Health Care” that appears on a pro-abortion website. I know next to nothing about Christian Fiala, but I do know a lot about Joyce Arthur, who is the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.
To be honest, I have to hand it to Arthur. Not many are as brutally candor. In her worldview, there is only one point of view on abortion and to recognize another (pro-life) is to give legitimacy to those who deserve none.

For example, last year she blasted media outlets for being too “balanced” in their coverage of the death of abortionist Henry Morgentaler. How so? They’d interviewed pro-life Canadians.
The pro-life perspective “is an extremist view,” not deserving of “legitimacy” and “does not deserve equal time or respect in Canada,” she intoned.

Other times she’s vigorously opposed “Motion 408” which called on Parliament to condemn discrimination against females occurring because of sex-selective abortions. No hearings, no legislation, just a condemnation of lethal discrimination based on sex. Way too much for Ms. Arthur.
But, in another sense, this makes perfect sense. Arthur once said, “If the fetuses are recognized in [law], …it could bleed into people’s consciousness and make people change their minds about abortion.”

(In the context of abortion an interesting choice of language—“bleed”—is it not?)
So it only makes sense for Arthur–having defended doing nothing to stop sex-selection abortion, insisting that only her view is given media attention, and warning that too much truth might change people’s mind on abortion–to counsel outlawing conscience.
You can read their piece in its entirety. Let me make just two quick points.

#1. They write, “Reproductive health care is the only field in medicine where freedom of conscience isaccepted
as an argument to limit a patient‘s right to a legal medical treatment.” I do not know if that is true, but let’s assume it is. How many other fields in medicine does a physician deliberately kill one of his patients (the unborn child) because the other (her mother) wants the other patient out of the way? To pro-abortionists, who work 24/7 to “normalize” abortion, this is either heresy or poppycock. One patient has to go and it’s the one with the power who gets to decide to “terminate” the other.
By the way, is it any surprise that doctor-assisted suicide—once confined to the “terminally ill”—is now used to dispatch children in Belgium? How long before doctors’ licenses will be on the hook if they refuse to kill born children?

#2. “Unfortunately,” Arthur and Fiala write, “a global consensus seems to have emerged among (pro-choice) medical professionals that clinicians do indeed have a right to deny reproductive health care that they personally disagree with.” What? Bad enough that those crazy pro-lifers (and those who have no opinion about abortion) believe in the right of conscience. But “pro-choice” organizations?! Of course, they devote most of the rest of their article to insisting that such organizations don’t have their heads on straight, don’t see the contradictions, etc., etc., etc.
The “1984-ish” overtones to this kind of argument—remember “thoughtcrimes”?—ought to make anyone (other than the most absolutist pro-abortionist) nervous.

Source: NRLC News