The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, in London.
If you read this blog, you might be surprised to know that my master’s thesis last year wasn’t JUST about Hobby Lobby. I also worked on Doogan v. NHS, a Scottish case where a pair of Catholic midwives – Mary Doogan and Concepta Wood – sought an exemption to supervising abortions. The lower court ruled in their favor: it found that even though they were not required to directly perform abortion, their supervisory duties brought them close enough to the abortion itself to qualify them for an exemption.
Not so, says the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which ruled today that conscientious objection is only available to midwives who participate in a “hands-on” way with the abortion.
If you’re interested in the case, the decision itself is worth a read – it’s short and provides a really clear overview of some details of the case that I didn’t know when I wrote my thesis, such as the fact that the midwives’ ward dealt exclusively with late-term abortions. (Does that matter, from a legal perspective or a religious one, since they believe life begins at conception? I’m not sure but it’s an interesting question.)
To be honest I didn’t really have a problem with extending the exemption to Doogan and Wood – the lower court made the interesting point that having midwives struggling with their consciences in situations that require quick responses wasn’t exactly grand for patient health, and the ward only dealt with about 60 abortions a year, mostly scheduled well in advance, which would seem to make it easy to work around Doogan and Wood’s objection.
But given that obviously the decision would have implications beyond their 60 cases a year, it’s probably good that the court has drawn a solid line. Lady Hale, who wrote the judgment, specifically avoids giving answers on bigger questions about how conscientious objection fits into religious freedom rights more broadly, focusing narrowly on the definition of “treatment” under the Abortion Act.
There’s an interesting side discussion in the decision about whether or not it’s legal or desirable to refuse to hire conscientious objectors altogether, in order to avoid problems like this one. I think I’m going to come back to that in another blog post, but for now I wanted to share the final tally from my master’s thesis: One case overturned, one upheld. Fifty percent’s not bad!
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