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Dear Canada, Respect for Conscience is Fundamental to Health Care

By NZHPA
March 18, 2016
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Rachael Wong is a lawyer from Auckland who is currently working as a legal consultant with the Law Reform Commission in Samoa. She has recently completed a Master of Bioethics and Health Law for which she wrote her dissertation on freedom of conscience in health care. She maintains that a health professional’s exercise of conscience is inseparable from their delivery of health care. Writing for First Things, Wesley J. Smith …Read More

A Good Death is a Gift

By NZHPA
February 15, 2016
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Dr Samantha Murton, an NZHPA member and General Practitioner from Wellington, reflects on a recent death in her family. I was busily involved in our own personal experience of a gracious death with my Mother-in-Law. If I could say something now to the Health Select Committee on its Investigation into the Ending of One’s Life, it would be this. Knowing all that I know as a health professional, it was …Read More

You Don’t Discourage Suicide by Assisting Suicide

By NZHPA
January 29, 2016
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Caroline Downey is a Kiwi currently based in London. In her submission to the Health Select Committee on the investigation into ending one’s life in New Zealand, she writes “we have to start talking about the problem of suicide in New Zealand – not the need for assisted suicide.” I oppose any legalisation of euthanasia or assisted suicide in New Zealand. On the 19th of October 2015, The Guardian published …Read More

Palliative Care is Everyone’s Business

By NZHPA
January 26, 2016
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Dr Lucia Mitchell is a General Practitioner and Palliative Care Doctor who works in Richmond, Nelson, New Zealand. She shares with us her submission to the Health Select Committee on the investigation into ending one’s life in New Zealand. I oppose any legalisation of euthanasia or assisted suicide in New Zealand. Death has in many ways been distanced from our daily lives and has become foreign, unfamiliar and feared. Health …Read More

The Right to Freedom of Conscience

By NZHPA
December 2, 2015
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By Neil Vaney Introduction A recent post from Terry Bellamak, new president of the Abortion Law Rights Association of New Zealand (ALRANZ), questions why health professionals such as doctors and nurses should be legally able to use the claim of freedom of conscience in refusing to provide contraceptive or abortion advice or services. (http://wp.me/x1XY6w-z1, 14 Sep 2015). Bellamak likens this to the case of Kim Davis, county clerk of Rowan …Read More

The Right to Freedom of Conscience under Attack

By NZHPA
August 11, 2013
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Some academics have recently suggested that conscientious objection is an unwarranted barrier to the provision of reproductive health care. In April 2013, the American Journal of Public Health published an article “Abortion Law Around the World: Progress and Pushback.” The authors perceive that there has been a rise in “unregulated conscientious objection”. They consider that this is a barrier for women trying to access lawful abortions. NZHPA believes that one inference that can be drawn from the article is that health professionals should be expected to “leave their conscience …Read More