A Catholic bishop has asked whether the Irish Medical Council has now decided it is “acceptable for doctors to take part in the deliberate killing of a patient”. To support this, he noted that, in its new 9th edition of the Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics, the Medical Council has dropped the line: “You must not take part in the deliberate killing of a patient.”
Bishop of Elphin Kevin Doran recalled that this line was “very clearly” stated in the 8th edition of the guide, published in 2016. That the Medical Council had dropped the line meant he found himself “wondering if this is an oversight, or is it the case that the Medical Council has now decided that it is acceptable for doctors to take part in the deliberate killing of a patient”.
He said: “Even if assisted suicide were to be legalised, for example, that of itself would never make the killing of patients ethical.”
Chairman of the Catholic Bishops’ Council for Life, Bishop Doran, said he had written to the president of the Medical Council seeking clarification on the matter, “but my letter has received neither a reply nor even an acknowledgment”.
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The Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics was a “very important document for medical doctors, because it is against this code that their professional conduct and practice is measured”, he said. “Unfortunately, there are numerous defects in the new edition of the guide.”
Bishop Doran pointed out also that “the sections on Assisted Human Reproduction (47) and Abortion (48), which were in the 8th edition of the guide, have disappeared from the 9th edition”.
In his view “this would seem to suggest that the Medical Council does not see these very significant areas of activity as involving any ethical questions or risks. Is this simply because the law in these areas has changed? Have actions which were previously unethical, and were quite simply ‘bad medicine’, suddenly become ethical because they are now legal?”
In the new guide, under the heading of Conscientious Objection, he noted too how it “reflects recent legislation on abortion, in that it requires doctors to ‘make such arrangements as may be necessary to enable the patient to obtain the required treatment’”.
He queried “how it makes sense ethically to require a doctor to assist a patient to access a procedure which the doctor, herself or himself, regards as unethical”.
It was the case that these matters “do not only affect doctors”, he said. They also “impact the common good of our society by radically redefining what is ‘good’ for us all”, he said.
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