UN Group Says Government Must Force Medical Personnel to Provide Abortions

By | January 16, 2025

NEW YORK, January 17 (C-Fam) A group of UN human rights experts have called for governments to clamp down on conscientious objection to abortion by hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel.

In a report published this week, the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls claims that governments have an international obligation to force all hospitals to provide abortions, including religious hospitals. The report goes as far as describing institutional conscientious objection as “impermissible” and a “human rights violation.”

“States must prevent and reform laws that overextend conscientious objection and that allow sexist and patriarchal personal beliefs to determine the provision of health care,” the report explains.

The working group, made up of five feminist activists and academics, claims that conscience rights do not apply to institutions, but only to real persons and that even in such cases they must be “narrowly defined”.

“States must prohibit the practice of institutional conscientious objection (including de facto institutional conscientious objection), to comply with their obligations to ensure equal access to health services,” the experts conclude in their report. This implies also an obligation to have doctors willing to perform abortions on staff, according to the experts. They further elaborate that, in order to ensure such staffing requirements, hospitals must be able to discriminate against doctors who profess pro-life religious beliefs.

In all cases, the report claims, governments must “strictly regulate” the exercise of conscientious objection in order to guarantee access to abortion.

“Individual conscientious objection must be conditional on the State’s ability to fulfil the

right to equality and the sexual and reproductive health rights of women and girls within its jurisdiction,” reads another conclusion of the report.

Among the conditions for exercising the right to conscience, the working group claims that “to comply with international law” doctors who object to performing an abortion must always promptly refer the mother to a doctor willing to perform the abortion, even if it is goes against their conscience. In case of an “emergency situation”, doctors can never object to performing an abortion, the report says.

For their part, nurses and other medical workers must be forced to perform any and all abortions, according to the feminist experts, because the right of conscientious objection only applies to those “directly involved” in providing the abortion but not to other medical personnel who provide “auxiliary, administrative or instrumental support.”

In addition to adopting such strict laws and regulations the working group claims that states have an obligation to “create and invest in systems capable of monitoring the use of conscientious objection routinely and preventing abuse of it.” Moreover, they insist that any mother who is denied an abortion must be able to prosecute and sue the government, doctors and medical providers. “Denial of abortion is not acceptable, as the right to a safe and legal abortion is protected under international law.”

The working group explains that the strict rules to limit the exercise of conscience are necessary to “affirm the right to safe and legal abortion, including abortion care, and recognize women’s autonomy” and to combat barriers to abortion from “harmful gender stereotyping and sexist attitudes.”

The working group also claims that governments have an obligation to decriminalize abortion in all circumstances to make sure doctors aren’t inhibited by fear of criminal prosecution for an illegal abortion. “Without such certainty, physicians may invoke conscientious objection to avoid legal liability for providing an abortion.”

The claim that abortion is an international right is disputed. No widely ratified international human rights treaty includes a right to abortion, either expressly or by implication.

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