Posts by Jonathan Imbody

Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA) member and OB/Gyn physician Dr. Regina Frost appears to be a modern-day Queen Esther, taking a courageous stand for the faith as did the Biblical heroine. Dr. Frost is the face of Christian doctors in a high-stakes federal lawsuit to protect the new federal conscience protection rule from legal assault.

By implementing a new policy promulgated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Trump administration has moved to stop taxpayer funding of the use of fetal tissue, from elective abortions, for research purposes.

The cauldron of ideological hostility toward religious principles and people of faith at Yale Law School just boiled over, and its discriminatory policies targeting religious students threaten to ooze throughout academia and beyond.

Health professionals today who hold to historically noncontroversial moral and ethical standards—such as not killing born or unborn patients—face increasing pressures to compromise those moral and ethical standards. The coercive pressures come from ideologues and activists within and outside medicine, from demanding patients and from the government.

As noted in previous essays, a New England Journal of Medicine opinion piece entitled, “Physicians, Not Conscripts — Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” by Affordable Care Act architect Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and University of Pennsylvania professor Ronit Stahl, advocates for limiting the exercise of conscience objections.

The contentious confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh mirrored a less outwardly raucous, though equally intense, conflict in the scientific and research community. Our country, our culture and the scientific community appear at a crossroads. We are determining the extent to which objectivity, evidence and reason—as opposed to bias, ideology and emotion—will shape our conclusions and our policies.

This excerpt is the seventh in a series of essays on conscience in healthcare, by Jonathan Imbody, Vice President for Government Relations for the Christian Medical Association and Director of Freedom2Care. To find the series, visit www.cmda.org/thepoint.

On the heels of World War II, with medical ethics in the spotlight following unconscionable Nazi atrocities, the World Medical Association (WMA) decided the Hippocratic Oath, which had guided medicine since around 500 BC, needed to be replaced. So the WMA developed a new oath that contained some of the principles of the ancient oath but opened the door to continual modernizing.

It’s one thing to expect physicians to do everything possible to advance healing for patients. It’s quite another to insist that whatever the patient wants, the patient gets—so the physician must provide it at risk of his or her career. Whenever one group gets its way regardless of the impact on others, that is not autonomy; that is tyranny.