Good news for conscientious objection in the defence of life. After the Council of Europe and bills in the United States and Russia, the positive statement made by the Italian Bioethics Committee

08-04-2011 - by Giuseppe Brienza

Especially at times like ours with the potent advance (and dictatorship) of the “culture of death”, the legal and moral recognition of conscientious objection on the part of physicians, health care workers or pharmacists constitutes a civil conquest in the true sense of the term. What this implies is that every time a law or a Code of some sort contemplates forms of conduct that directly cause – or can help to cause – the suppression of an innocent human life (for example, abortion and euthanasia), the health care professional in question can refuse to comply with it.

A decisive battle was won in this regard in Strasbourg on 7 October 2010 thanks to the resolute opposition of a group of members of the Council of Europe, who helped scuttle the umpteenth attempt to curtail the conscientious objection of physicians and health care professionals to abortion. Emerging more recently has been good news on the same front, and this time from both the east and the west of the secularized western world.

Initially offering grounds for a certain degree of optimism are the family policy proposals consigned by Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow on 17 January of this year to the most senior officials of the former Soviet empire for consideration at the planned meeting of the Council of State of the Russian Federation (a body chaired by President Dmitri Medvedev). Effectively speaking, this is the first time the Russian Orthodox Church has sent an official document with proposals to the country’s political authorities. Worthy of special mention among them is the one relative to abortion no longer being covered by the national health service (except in cases of the danger of death of a woman), together with the ensuing request for it to be legally binding for women to be informed about all the negative consequences of “the voluntary interruption of pregnancy”, and that they be given adequate time to ponder what is about to be done if they do manifest the intention to take recourse to a homicidal practice. Back in June 2010 the Russian Orthodox Church had already launched an appeal for more severe dispositions to reduce abortions in the country, also in light of the alarming decline in the population. Let us recall that Communist Russia was the first country in the contemporary world to introduce abortion. This took place in 1920, just three years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Outlawed once again by Stalin in 1936 (except for some situations), it was reintroduced in 1955, two years after his death. In 1964, less than ten years later, Russia or the Soviet Union witnessed the highest number of abortions in its history: 5.6 million innocent children killed in the maternal womb. In 2004 there were more abortions than live births: 1.6 million and 1.5 million respectively.  

As far the ‘west’ is concerned, filed at the US House of Representatives at the beginning of this year were three bills that in analogue ways seek to protect the conscience of health care professionals and see to it that taxpayers’ money is not used to finance abortions. American Catholics are vociferous in their support of these bills, and this also thanks to the ever resolute commitment of the chairman of the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston. Among other things, this Italian-American prelate has written three letters to the House of Representatives on these bills. The first of these letters deals with the bill called the “Protect Life Act”), and in it Cardinal DiNardo stressed that it would tackle some shortcomings in the reform of the health care system proposed by President Obama, bringing it “in line with the policies on abortion and rights of conscience that have long prevailed in other federal health care programmes”. It would do so by preventing federal funds from subsidizing abortions or health care assistance plans that include abortion, defending the conscience of health care professionals who refuse to be party to the killing of life in the maternal womb, and making sure that the federal law would not prevail over state laws regarding abortion and conscientious objection. From this latter point of view, however, the right to conscientious objection on the federal level is to a great extent thwarted with respect to chemical abortion (through the so called ‘day after pill’), sterilization and the sale of contraceptives in the wake of the recent decision by the Obama administration to abrogate the legislation in conformity with natural law passed under the administration of President Bush, Jr.

The second of the meritorious bills before the US House of Representatives deals with non-discrimination of pro-life hospitals (“Abortion Non-Discrimination Act”) and would modify the amendment proposed by Representatives Hyde and Weldon, endowing health care structures that do not practice abortions with the right to legal recourse against government discrimination. This proposal, commented Cardinal DiNardo, would redress a current situation of discrimination in the American system, establishing the principle whereby “no health care structure should be compelled by the government to practice abortions or take part therein”.

Lastly, the bill called the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would recognize the sacrosanct right of US taxpayers (and their families) who are pro-life not to see their money used “to support and promote abortion”.

If the proposals and bills described above are approved, and hopefully brought before parliament in Italy as well, this would finally raise a bulwark against the heretofore unchallenged principle of the public financing of a lethal procedure, abortion, which the majority of people endowed with common sense know not to be something inherent in “health care assistance”.

In the meantime, thanks to the document approved on  February 25 last by the National Bioethics Committee (NBC), and entitled “Note regarding conscientious objection on the part of a pharmacist in the sale of emergency contraceptive products”, Italian pharmacists will also be able to invoke the right to conscientious objection in order not to sell the so-called “day after pill”, which by now is incorrectly called “an emergency contraceptive” (in fact, very often the outcome is abortion and hence not contraception) by the NBC as well. 

This authoritative technical body issued its opinion in response to a query raised by Hon. Luisa Capitanio Santolini, former president of the Forum of Family Associations, regarding the conscientious objection clause invoked by many Italian pharmacists relative to the “day after pill” and other “products”, whose accompanying instructions on use do not exclude the possibility of a reactive mechanism causing the elimination of a human embryo.

Even if in relativistic terms the Committee in question “had” to recall in its opinion that conscientious objection had to be practiced in full respect for the other fundamental rights stipulated un the Italian Constitution, including access to “health care assistance” recognized by law (this unfortunately includes abortion, which is hypocritically defined by Law n° 194/1978 as “voluntary interruption of pregnancy”), in this specific case it positively acknowledged that a pharmacist does have a role akin to that of “health care workers”. Therefore, analogously to what occurs for other health care professionals, the NBC confirmed that  pharmacists must necessarily have the right to conscientious objection. The fact that a pharmacist plays a “less direct” role compared with whomsoever clinically practices an abortion was not considered sufficient grounds to deny that right to him, since the handing over of the product makes him an accomplice of a possible abortion in a seamless cause and effects chain.

In the face of the hypothesis that the lawmakers may well acknowledge the right to conscientious objection on the part of pharmacists and pharmacy personnel, the members of the NBC agreed that considered and guaranteed must be the interests of all the parties involved, as is generally the case in analogous situations. Unfortunately, in order to avoid a broadside against the “dictatorship of relativism”, the Committee determined that an indispensable premise for the possible legal extension of conscientious objection to pharmacists is that the woman in question must in any case be able to enjoy access to chemical abortion, and hence obtain “the day after pill” elsewhere or through different means.