Introduction :
The aims of this workshop are
- To discuss what kinds of conscientious objection are likely to be advanced by health professionals within the next decades,
- to develop criteria for determining the ethical acceptability of different kinds of conscientious objection
- to recommend regulatory policies
- to propose ways in which conscientious objection should be taught and dealt with in the education of medical students
- To foster collaboration between researchers working in different institutions and countries, particularly the UK, Australia, Sweden and Italy
Conscientious objection by health professionals is one of the most pressing problems in bioethics. Health professionals are already allowed to object to many activities, most notably abortion, contraception, and various aspects of end-of-life care ranging from withdrawal of treatment to euthanasia in those jurisdictions in which it is legal. However, the introduction of new medical options, such as IVF (especially for single people and gay couples), embryonic stem cell therapies, genetic selection, human bio-enhancement, sex modification, create new areas of potential moral conflicts. Recent advances in genetic engineering foreshadow even more controversial interventions over which people will be divided; for example, gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 has recently been used by scientists in China to modify genes responsible for beta-thalassemia, and the same genetic engineering technique holds promise for many other types of interventions on human embryos. New medical developments of this type- whose applications range from therapeutic to enhancing interventions – will likely create many more cases of conscientious objection in the healthcare context. The compromise policies currently used to regulate conscientious objection to abortion might not be adequate. In this “horizon scanning” workshop, we aim to analyse the ethical, legal and practical problems that conscientious objection is likely to raise in the context of future advances in technology, and to propose a range of reasonable approaches.