In debates about conscience rights something very strange has happened. The left, which used to champion conscience rights, is now  frequently opposed to such rights.

In this article, American scholar Robert Vischer wonders why this has happened. He takes as his starting point the decision by President Obama to curtail the conscience rights afforded to health-care professionals by the Bush Administration in its last days.

Vischer offers a number of reasons why the left has largely abandoned the field of conscience rights. Vischer’s particular focus in this article is on the rights of health-care providers including pharmacists.

One is that the left sees the issue purely through the prism of abortion and therefore recognition of the right of health-care workers not to perform abortions or sell the morning-after-pill is seen as a defeat for abortion rights and women’s rights.

A second, related to this, is that if you recognise one person’s right to follow their conscience that could be at someone else’s expense. Therefore, if a pharmacist won’t sell something on grounds of conscience, the customer’s rights are being violated even if there is another chemist down the road that will sell the product instead.

The thinking, as Vischer puts it, is that, “Not only should the full range of pharmaceuticals be available at every pharmacy, but they must be provided, in the word of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, with ‘no hassle, no delay, no lecture.’”

The third reason, Vischer says, is a growing belief that once a person receives a license to practice they become, in effect, an agent of the State and therefore must do anything and everything the State requires of them regardless of their own moral convictions.

He quotes on this score an editorial in The New York Times which said that “pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives are engaged in ‘an intolerable abuse of power’ and need to ‘find another line of work.’”

But as Vischer points out, “The problem with this argument is that it fundamentally rewrites the history and purpose of professional licensing, which has traditionally been aimed at ensuring competence, not on co-opting providers into serving State interests at the expense of their own moral agency.”

In Ireland, the conscience rights of health-care providers, and others, is increasingly being written out of the script, and without any real public awareness of this. For example, it seems that the Code of Conduct for Irish chemists requires them to sell the Morning-After-Pill like it or not.

Vischer concludes: “Conscience is not the only value that matters in our health care debates, but there is a disturbing trend among progressives of acting as though it does not matter at all.”

Indeed.