Madam, - Your religious affairs correspondent reports (March 11th) on an article in The Word magazine by Fr Vincent Twomey suggesting that a conscientious objection by a doctor to providing particular medical services logically extends to providing information about alternative sources. This is impossible to accept.
A patient looks to a physician for two sorts of assistance. The first is for the direct provision of medical services and the second for information about medical options. If the physician regards some services as immoral, s/he can exercise a conscientious objection to providing them. If s/he feels particularly strongly, s/he may campaign politically to get the State to impose this view even on people who do not accept it. But the patient comes to the doctor for medical, not spiritual, advice, and providing information is not the same thing as using that information.
If a physician declines to perform a service, it is his or her duty to indicate how the patient can obtain it. It is for the patient to decide whether a relevant and legal option is moral.
Conscientious objection does not entitle a physician to impose private moral views on a patient. - Yours, etc,
TIMOTHY KING,
Shanganagh Terrace,
Killiney,
Co Dublin.