Guidelines drafted by the General Medical Council, the regulatory body for the medical profession, were insufficient to protect doctors who believed "passive euthanasia" was morally wrong, said a June 30 written submission by Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff, Wales, as part of a public consultation.
The draft guidelines include a conscience clause that allows doctors to opt out of starving and dehydrating incapacitated patients to death, a practice legalized in 1993 when the House of Lords ruled that artificially administered food and fluid could be classed as medical treatment.
Archbishop Smith, chairman of the English and Welsh bishops' Department for Christian Responsibility and Citizenship, said that disagreements were most likely to arise in the context of clinical judgments precisely on such matters as "respecting a valid applicable refusal of clinically assisted nutrition and dehydration by someone who was not dying, especially someone who was in a 'persistent vegetative state.'"
He voiced particular concern that the guidelines say medics could not object "without first ensuring that arrangements have been made for another doctor to take over."
The guidelines state, "It is not acceptable to withdraw from a patient's care if this would leave the patient or colleagues with nowhere to turn."
Archbishop Smith said the requirement would put junior physicians with conscientious objections to euthanasia at particular risk.
"Is it the responsibility of this junior member to organize alternative cover?" he said. "This seems more naturally a responsibility of the team leader or ultimately of the hospital or trust.
"The responsibilities of junior or senior team members do not seem equal in this regard, and it is the more junior members who are more in danger of suffering discrimination as a result of diversity of belief and who are more in need of the protection of guidance on conscientious objection," he said.
The archbishop added: "As well as a duty to the patient, the employer has at least some level of duty toward staff, and colleagues have a duty to one another to respect diversity of belief."
John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, told Catholic News Service June 30 that the conscientious objection provision was effectively meaningless.
"To say that you cannot do something but will arrange for somebody else to do it is not exercising conscientious objection," Smeaton said.
More from CNS