Hippocratic and pro-life medical professionals and institutions are imperiled.
Religious freedom is under assault throughout the West around what I call “do harm” medicine. With doctors now expected to abort babies, kill or mutilate sick patients, or administer harmful substances to gender dysphoric children, and otherwise toe a utilitarian, secular line in performing professional responsibilities, Hippocratic and pro-life medical professionals and institutions are imperiled.
A column in Canada’s Globe and Mail epitomizes the mindset. When a hospital run by nuns in Nova Scotia threw in the towel, the hospital was secularized. André Picard, the paper’s health columnist celebrated the closure and called for more. From, “It’s Well Past Time for Catholic Hospitals to be Secularized”:
One hundred and twenty-nine of Canada’s 1,087 hospitals are Catholic. Most refuse to perform medical assistance in dying, abortion, tubal ligation, hysterectomy, vasectomy, gender-affirming care, or provide birth control to patients, with some even denying the morning-after pill to victims of sexual assault. There are exceptions, such as cancer-related surgery that affects the reproductive system, and workarounds like bringing in “visiting” nurses to administer meds, or building MAID clinics next door.
Many long-term care homes with religious affiliations also refuse to allow MAID on their premises. These policies are offensive – and likely unconstitutional (court challenges are underway) — and particularly problematic in smaller communities like Antigonish where there is a single hospital or care home.
Never mind that section 2 (a) of Canadian Charter explicitly states: “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: 1: freedom of conscience and religion.” In contrast, making people dead is not in the charter. Abortion is not in the charter. Mutilating gender dysphoric people is not in the charter.
Picard would reduce religious expression in health care to honoring diets and other such cultural matters:
Health care facilities like hospitals and care homes should prioritize cultural accommodation, from providing kosher or halal foods, to facilitation of religious and spiritual support and rituals, which can be central to healing. Those initiatives are about respecting rights, not denying them.
That’s akin to shriveling freedom of religion to a mere freedom of worship.
Picard doesn’t mention that these hospitals were founded in large part through philanthropy by Catholics and might not exist otherwise. But that doesn’t matter to secularist hegemons, since it is not their liberty ox being gored. With government funding of health care as their pretext, anti-religionists would happily throw this essential liberty over Niagara Falls.
The same assaults on freedom are happening in the United States. Several Catholic hospitals have been sued over these issues. Nuns involved with health care have sued Illinois and New York to be protected from forced participation in certain aspects of assisted suicide. Efforts are even underway to force caregivers to deprive dementia patients of sufficient sustenance to sustain life under certain circumstances. The free exercise of religion and Hippocratic morality are both at material risk.
There is a huge shortage of doctors in Canada — and that’s a growing problem here. Patients may wait weeks or even months to access specialized care. But anti-Christian attitudes are becoming so pronounced and intolerance of faith so extreme that Picard and others of his ilk would rather religious institutions close and professionals leave the sector than maximize access to care through comity. As Picard writes:
MAID has become the catalyst for long-overdue change. Religious hospitals need to either offer care without discrimination or get out of the business altogether.
Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.
If Catholic hospitals shutter their doors and doctors and nurses vacate health professions rather than violate their religious beliefs, intolerant secularists will point angry fingers at religion and claim that believers don’t care about patients in need. But the fault will be entirely their own.