Geripal-podcast

Today’s podcast may be a stretch for our listeners.  Please stick with us.  No matter what your position on medical aid in dying (I’m ambivalent) or abortion (I’m pro-choice), this is a bioethics podcast, and I hope that we can all agree that the ethical issues at stake deserve a critical re-think.  All three of today’s guests are well established bioethicists.   Let me start by quote/paraphrasing one of today’s guests, Mara Buchbinder, who puts her finger on the issue we talk about today:   “Typically when we think about conscience in medical ethics we think about it in terms of  a negative claim of conscience, where a clinician refuses (or objects) to provide care.  But what we know from my research and those of others, people also articulate a positive claim of conscience: they feel compelled to provide a service - whether it’s abortion provision or medical aid in dying -  because of a deeply held conviction that this is the right thing to do.”   I’ll continue by quoting Lisa Harris, who wrote in the NEJM