WaPo article on conscience conflicts between medical providers/personnel and patients:

Many religious health workers find no conflict between their beliefs and their jobs. But others describe what amounts to a sense of siege, with the secular world increasingly demanding they capitulate to doing procedures, prescribing pills or performing tasks that they find morally reprehensible.

Beginning in medical and nursing schools, some health workers describe struggling over where to draw the line. Will they refuse to perform an abortion or a sterilization, to fill a prescription for a morning-after pill or to pull the plug on a terminally ill patient? Will they refer patients to health workers who will? Or is that tantamount to being complicit in an immoral act?

Many will discuss their experiences only with a promise of anonymity, fearing being reprimanded, fined, denied promotions or fired. Often they will speak publicly only when they have new jobs.

"I’ve run into major conflicts with my colleagues who don’t understand my belief system," said Jan R. Hemstad, a Catholic anesthesiologist in Yakima, Wash., who will not participate in sterilizations. "I’ve had a colleague threaten to call the police to say I’ve abandoned a patient who wanted an elective sterilization."

snip

Fertility specialist James D. Madden, a Catholic, will treat only married couples using their own sperm and eggs.

"I believe the optimal circumstances for a child is to have a mother and a father. They contribute different things to the offspring," said Madden, of the Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. "I’ve sort of picked my way through these ethical issues my whole life, and that’s one I haven’t gotten comfortable with."

Patrick Pullicino, a Catholic neurologist from Newark, has never agreed to withhold patients’ food and fluids.

"I’ve had many occasions where relatives of stroke victims come up to me and say, ‘She’s suffering and wouldn’t want to live in this state, and we want to withdraw all care,’ " Pullicino said. "I’ve had to tell them, ‘You’ll have to find someone else.’ I couldn’t sleep at night if I did some of those things."

He also refuses to work with embryonic stem cells. "I believe it’s destruction of a human life. It’s wrong."

Family practitioners and obstetrician-gynecologists describe moving from town to town and being shunned by colleagues because they do not want to dispense birth control or morning-after pills or perform sterilizations or abortions. Nurses and physician assistants refuse to dispense the morning-after pill. Some doctors risk the ire of unmarried men after refusing to prescribe them Viagra.

A surprisingly non-snarky list. Here’s the longer article, with what I thought was a scary set of scare quotes:

The issue has become acute for some religious workers, especially devout Christians, for whom the concept of "conscience" plays a particularly prominent role. One development after another has challenged their values: treatments using fetal tissue; physician-assisted suicide; the RU-486 abortion pill; the morning-after pill; fertility clinics discarding thousands of excess embryos; and now a looming wave of therapies derived from embryonic stem cells.

Dang those Christians with that concept of "conscience."

God preserve me from a medical professional without one.