Whose duty is it to advise that some healthcare professionals will not help you or refer you?

In ‘A consequentialist case for permitting conscientious objection in healthcare,’ Steve Clarke proposes a publicly available registry for people seeking certain medical procedures (eg, abortion) to which some clinicians object for moral reasons.1 The registry would list healthcare professionals (HCPs) available to perform those procedures, and patients could locate clinicians willing to help them and bypass the others. HCPs could also use the registry as an informational source for referrals, provided they are willing to make referrals. Clarke presents two chief virtues of this kind of registry. It would work to ensure that patients do not encounter HCPs unwilling to help them. It would also help protect HCPs from inquiries about services to which they have moral/religious objections and who may even object to making a referral for those services. Clarke presents this registry as a practical bypass of certain ethical conflicts, by keeping would-be disputants from ever…

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