Over at First Things, I write about the threats to medical conscience from laws mandating complicity in abortion and assisted suicide. From, “The Coming Medical Martyrdom:”

Hippocratic-believing professionals, such as faithful Catholics and Muslims, are increasingly being pressured to practice medicine without regard to their personal faith or conscience beliefs. This moral intolerance is slowly being imbedded into law.
Victoria, Australia, for example, legally requires all doctors to perform—or be complicit in—abortions: If a patient requests a legal termination and the doctor has moral qualms, he is required to refer her to a colleague who will do the deed.
Such laws are a prescription for medical martyrdom, by which I mean doctors being forced to choose between adhering to their faith or moral code and remaining in their profession. Some have already suffered for their beliefs. During a speaking tour of Australia in 2010, I met doctors who had moved from their homes in Victoria to escape the abortion imposition. I asked them what they would do if Victoria’s law were to go national. “Quit medicine,” they all said, or move to another country.

Canada is heading in the same direction as Victoria regarding euthanasia. U.S. medical associations are on record as opposing robust rules and laws that protect Hippocratic doctors from participating in acts of killing.

I conclude:

If these trends continue, twenty years from now, those who feel called to a career in health care will face an agonizing dilemma: either participate in acts of killing or stay out of medicine. Those who stay true to their consciences will be forced into the painful sacrifice of embracing martyrdom for their faith.

If you thought the fight over the Obamacare contraception/sterilization was intense, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.