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October 2, 2008

Conference to explore conflicts of conscience

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[Transcript]

ATLANTA – Perhaps an issue as old as medicine itself, how does a patient’s right to legal medical services relate to a physician’s moral or religious objection to providing those services? Georgia State University associate law professor Leslie Wolf, who specializes in health law and ethics, says there must be a balance.

WOLF: It’s as old as Hippocrates, and it’s just the topics may be changing but it’s an issue that’s been a central issue for a long, long time and we need to grapple with it. And we live in a pluralist society and there are a lot of different traditions that are at issue and we need to figure out how to deal with that. And of course we don’t want to ask people to compromise their deeply held beliefs. On the other hand we want to make sure patients get appropriate services, or at least appropriate information and referrals. [length: 0:36]

The long-standing debate will be the topic of a conference titled “The Role of Conscience in the Practice of Medicine” from 12 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, at the Georgia State University Student Center. Panelist Farr Curlin is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.

WOLF: He does a lot of research on the issues of religion and spirituality in medicine and has both conducted empirical research – so asking physicians about their opinions and practices in this regard, how they relate to their patients, do they talk about their religious convictions with their patients or their patients’ religious convictions – as well as doing some more analytical work about what the role of conscience in medicine should be. [length: 0:33]

The conference’s second panelist, Martha Swartz, is an attorney and adjunct law professor at Rutgers School of Law at Camden.

WOLF: And she has conducted comprehensive legal analysis of various statutes and regulations that apply to conscientious objection in medicine, and thinks about what does that mean when we think about the roles of professionals, because of course medicine is a profession. And what are the obligations within that profession? We license physicians, we license all sorts of medical professionals – pharmacists, nurses – and there’s sort of an agreement, a societal agreement. We give you particular powers, a particular domain, and we can’t go, you know, to our neighbor down the street necessarily and they can’t hold themselves out that way, and therefore there may be additional obligations because we privilege that role. And so you may have other obligations beyond what your own personal views are. [length 0:53]

For Georgia State University RadioLine, I’m Michael Davis.