The Crossroads of Medical Ethics, Human Rights, and Religion

Show #115 | Guests: Phyllida Burlingame, Reproductive Justice Policy Director with the Northern California ACLU. Burlingame’s a nationally recognized expert on sex education advocacy, and she has led the ACLU-NC’s work on this issue since 2001. A summa cum laude Harvard graduate, she is the steering committee chair of Bay Area Communities for Health Education and a member of California’s Adolescent Sexual Health Working Group and the Fresno Regional Foundation’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention committee. David DeCosse is Director of Campus Ethics Programs, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and editor of a new book from Orbis called Conscience and Catholicism: Rights, Responsibilities, and Institutional Responses where leading ethicists and theologians address “conscience,” a term with loaded meaning and controversy in the Catholic Church around issues like political participation, human sexuality, war and institutional violence, and theological dissent. | Show Summary: This month, a California court upheld the right of Dignity Health hospitals to withhold health treatments that conflict with its Catholic standards. The ACLU plans to appeal. And Washington state law requiring pharmacists to dispense prescriptions regardless of their personal convictions may be headed to the Supreme Court. What happens when the rights of a patient - usually a woman - conflict with the moral standards of the individual charged with her medical care?