UN group says government must force medical personnel to provide abortions

(New York—C-Fam) A group of UN human rights experts have called for governments to clamp down on conscientious objection to abortion by hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel.

In a report published this week, the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls claims that governments have an international obligation to force all hospitals to provide abortions, including religious hospitals. The report goes as far as describing institutional conscientious objection as “impermissible” and a “human rights violation.”

“States must prevent and reform laws that overextend conscientious objection and that allow sexist and patriarchal personal beliefs to determine the provision of health care,” the report explains.

The working group, made up of five feminist activists and academics, claims that conscience rights do not apply to institutions, but only to real persons and that even in such cases they must be “narrowly defined.”

“States must prohibit the practice of institutional conscientious objection (including de facto institutional conscientious objection), to comply with their obligations to ensure equal access to health services,” the experts conclude in their report. This implies also an obligation to have doctors willing to perform abortions on staff, according to the experts. They further elaborate that, in order to ensure such staffing requirements, hospitals must be able to discriminate against doctors who profess pro-life religious beliefs.

In all cases, the report claims, governments must “strictly regulate” the exercise of conscientious objection in order to guarantee access to abortion.

“Individual conscientious objection must be conditional on the State’s ability to fulfill the right to equality and the sexual and reproductive health rights of women and girls within its jurisdiction,” reads another conclusion of the report….

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Editor’s Note: Stefano Gennarini, J.D. writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute. This article appears with permission.”