Over 90% of Irish doctors refusing to commit abortions

By Jonathon Van Maren

I’ve noted before that the strange alliance between progressive politicians and Muslim minorities has an expiration date if religious immigrants are ever faced with the same attacks on conscience regularly faced by Christians in the West, especially on issues such as abortion and sexuality. Here in Canada, for example, Justin Trudeau discovered that Muslims are actually not on board with his abortion agenda when he attempted to change the requirements for the Canada Summer Jobs Program by inserting a values test into the application and faced strong pushback from Islamic groups. Muslims also pushed back on Kathleen Wynne’s radical sex education curriculum. And now, it seems that Ireland is discovering that their commitment to diversity may soon involve more than simply pushing Christians around. From the Irish Catholic:

Ireland’s reliance on Muslim doctors in hospitals around the country may derail Government plans to roll out a national abortion service, a leading obstetrician has said.

Large numbers of non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs) working in maternity units outside Dublin are Muslims from abroad, according to Dr Trevor Hayes of Kilkenny’s St Luke’s Hospital, who says he had been personally told that they have serious religious qualms about performing abortions.

“A lot of the NCHDs – a lot of the registrars and senior registrars and SHOs (senior house officers), so the front line – would be from Egypt, Sudan, and generally Muslim countries,” Dr Hayes told The Irish Catholic. “These would be in the country hospitals, and because of that they have frontline exposure, and they would have religious objections to be involved in the abortion service.”

Dr Hayes, who was named Obstetrician of the Year in 2009 and 2013 by Maternity and Infant Magazine said a dependence on Muslim consultants is preventing Cavan General Hospital from introducing an abortion service, and that he suspects that conscientious objections from Muslims could block abortions from taking place in 12 of the country’s 19 maternity units.

“I’m not professing that I have huge knowledge about Islam, but they have religious objections to being involved in it,” he said.

According to Dr Ali Selim, spokesman for the Dublin’s Islamic Culture Centre, abortion is unacceptable for Muslims except in cases of dire need. “In Islam abortion is the lesser harm, conducted only to save the mother’s life if all other options prove to be useless,” he told The Irish Catholic, adding: “Life is God’s gift.”

According to figures published by the Medical Council in 2016, roughly two out of five doctors registered to work in Ireland have trained abroad, with over three quarters of the country’s non-consultant hospital doctors being international medical graduates and with Pakistan and Sudan being the top countries from which internationally-qualified doctors come.

Obstetrics and Gynaecology is the field most likely to be staffed from doctors with overseas qualifications, with 58% of doctors in that area having graduated abroad.

In fact, over 90% of Irish doctors are refusing to perform abortions, and many hospitals are having trouble finding staff to assist with abortions even where there is a willing physician. The London Times reported that in smaller hospitals, it has been difficult for doctors to find any staff at all willing to assist in abortion procedures, with less than 5% of general practitioners indicating their willingness to work for Simon Harris’s abortion regime—about 200 out of 4,000 GPs. According to the New York Times, this is already making it extremely difficult for women to obtain abortions—one woman said she had to spend three days on the phone before she managed to find a doctor willing to do it and a clinic which actually had the necessary equipment. Despite the referendum result, abortion supporters are discovering that Ireland may have voted against the 8^th Amendment, but most did not actually vote for the abortion regime they desire—and they certainly have no intention of bloodying their hands along with Simon Harris and his gang.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.