Everyone hold on to your chairs, tables or bus seats, because Ben and Brittany - the environment-loving, peace-for-all, liberal beings that we are - are about to agree with former President George W. Bush.
Well, sort of.
In his last months as president, Bush proposed a bill expanding the rights of health care workers to allow them to refuse providing services or advice to patients seeking abortions, contraception or even blood transfusions when the workers morally oppose those treatments. Called the "Conscience Bill," it was enacted Jan. 20, a day known to AU students and D.C. residents as the biggest Metrorail ridership day in history - and to the rest of the country, as the day Barack Obama took office.
President Obama is trying to repeal the bill. It is, after all, a spectacular violation of the old warning to never discuss politics or religion in mixed company, and on top of that, it tosses in the all-important health care issue. It's no wonder everyone is upset.
This law puts us - and the community - between a rock and a hard place. People have the right to act according to their own good conscience so long as it doesn't hurt others. Keeping the Conscience Bill lets doctors act on their moral values, but at the expense of women, gays and possibly society on the whole. Repealing it dampers the rights of the health care professionals to practice medicine according to their conscience, but it could also prevent countless people, women especially, from being denied very important and possibly life-saving treatment. What to do?
Doctors and lawyers are both professionals. Maybe the ethical rules for one profession can inform the other. It's worth a try.
Under legal ethics rules, a lawyer can generally refuse to take a client. But once she's on the case, she could be disciplined or even disbarred if she fails to zealously represent her client. Zeal means representing with skill and passion, even clients the lawyer dislikes or whose values she finds morally repugnant. It sometimes means pursuing advocacy strategies the lawyer may not always think are the most fair or moral, such as making a plea agreement or settling a case. But a lawyer has a duty to tell the client about his options, and it is ultimately the client's choice how to proceed.
Lawyers, then, have a kind of two-step decision process. Either represent the client or don't, but once you're in, keep the client knowledgeable of his options so he can make informed decisions and follow those wishes.
How does this apply to the Conscience Bill debate? Our proposed solution is a variation on this two-step process. First, health care workers should have a duty to disclose all the options that could be medically helpful to a patient, whether the doctor finds the treatment morally objectionable or not. Second, after fulfilling this duty of disclosure, the doctor should have the option - except perhaps in urgent, life threatening situations - to decline to provide treatment she personally opposes. For example, if a fundamentalist Christian feels that birth control is murder, he or she should have to tell patients about birth control pills and condoms, but then should be free under most circumstances to refuse to distribute them. It may not be the choice we would make, but neither of us is the doctor.
We hope this hybrid will allow patients to make informed decisions while letting health care providers practice according to their conscience. It's not perfect, but both sides have legitimate interests and sometimes the baby must be split. We hope Congress will consider such a compromise.
It's been a pleasure writing this column. Today's is the last. Good luck, AU, D.C., the United States, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe and anyone else we may have forgotten.
Ben Moss and Brittany Meyer are students in the Washington College of Law and columnists for The Eagle. You can reach them at edpage@theeagleonline.com.
