Doctors Shouldn’t Have To Kill To Heal

Unless reason and human decency intervene, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education will commit a moral atrocity upon conscience in the practice of medicine in the United States.

On Jan. 1, the council will begin forcing residency programs in obstetrics and gynecology to train residents in induced abortions as a condition for accreditation, regardless of an institution’s or an individual’s moral opposition to abortion.

Thus, those who would apply themselves to the healing arts must, as a condition of their professional sanction, submit themselves first to the gruesome science of killing.

Until the council announced in February its revisions to the Program Requirements for Residency Education in Obstetrics and Gynecology, institutions and individual residents were allowed exemption from performing abortions under conscientious objections on moral grounds.

If the new proposals are not withdrawn before Jan. 1, that will change, compelling every ob-gyn to become an abortionist.

Even after the revisions were introduced, the council was quick to point out that medical schools could, rather than conduct the procedures, transfer students elsewhere for the required “training.”

This makes a mockery of conscience and places the council squarely in the coercive position of violating the deepest moral and religious convictions of those who consider abortion to be the taking of innocent life.

Especially in residency programs sponsored by religious denominations, the new requirements are fundamentally repugnant. In such institutions, the moral theology and practice that guide their mission strictly prohibit induced abortion as an absolute evil.

The issue is not whether residents should be prepared to treat patients who experience spontaneous or incomplete abortions or miscarriages. All residents are trained for those circumstances, as well as second-trimester fetal deaths, molar pregnancies and the fetal diagnostic procedures.

Residents are trained to care for patients postoperatively and are fully prepared to treat hemorrhage and infection, the most common complications of induced abortion.

They are, in short, medically trained to apply their skills of healing. They need not perform an abortion - the physical and moral antithesis of healing - to acquire medical proficiency.

In his letter to the accreditation council challenging the proposed revisions, Dr. Denis Cavanagh, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, urged rescission of the requirements.

“The fact is that most residents,” Cavanagh wrote, “like most … certified obstetriciangynecologists, do few if any induced abortions because they find their performance an unpleasant, emotionally draining task which runs counter to their usual goal of delivering healthy mothers of healthy babies. They find it particularly odious when they know that in 98 percent of the cases, the indication for abortion is social and not medical.”

In any event, Cavanagh noted that 89 percent of the nation’s 274 ob-gyn programs offer opportunities to perform first-trimester abortions, and 82 percent for second-trimester abortions. For a vocation of healing, these grim statistics reflect a broader cultural debasement of the dignity of human life.

Dr. Kevin J. Murrell, president of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds, also expressed strong resistance to the proposed revisions.

“Your revised regulations are seriously wrong,” Murrell wrote in his letter to the council. “You are pushing hard in the direction of making abortion a routine and expected norm for medical practice, a direction … that places the killing of patients on the same moral plane as curing them. This denies the explicit and implicit foundation of medicine as a healing profession.”

Murrell was most stirring in his defense of principles.

“They violate the fundamental principle that the physician is a healer, one who will not harm his patients, but will respect and care for them from conception,” he wrote. “They violate the integrity of the individual conscience, the consciences of individual trainees and those of training institutions, which trainees select, often for the very reason that the institution agrees with their own principles of conscience. They violate laws which uphold these positions of conscience. They violate a trust, fundamentally made to the truth, scientific and moral truth, not to political expediency or power.”

Voices of conscience forever have brought discomfort to those in their midst who were complacent or indifferent, yet this nation that hallows life, liberty and the sanctity of conscience invites such voices to resound. The accrediting council, which has so arrogantly betrayed its profession’s noble ideals, should listen to those voices and reverse itself.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Tommy Denton Fort Worth Star-Telegram