The case of Dr. Phil Boyle

Dr. Phil Boyle is a physician in Ireland who specializes in fertility treatments.  His clinic adheres to Church teaching, and thus Dr. Boyle limits his treatments to married couples.  Because of his refusal to provide treatment to an unmarried person, he was brought before the Medical Council for a "fitness to practice" inquiry.  Several weeks ago, Dr. Boyle called me, looking for some expert support to counter the charges that his conduct was unethical.  I'm not (even remotely) qualified to serve as an expert on medical ethics, but I was able to put him in touch with a friend of mine, Carr Furlin, a medical ethicist at the University of Chicago.  Dr. Furlin, along with medical ethics luminaries Daniel Sulmasy and Mark Siegler, provided a last-minute expert opinion that conclusively refuted the notion that Dr. Boyle's conscientious decision to limit his practice to married couples would somehow be construed as unethical.  Their opinion even seems to have had an impact on the opposing expert, judging from the opposing counsel's inability to elicit favorable testimony from the expert at the hearing.  Here is an excerpt from their expert opinion:

Conscientious refusals are as old as the Hippocratic Oath, in which physicians swear to refuse to provide drugs that would be used to hasten a patient’s death,"no matter how much implored.” Yet conscientious refusals are much more central to the practice of medicine than questions about sexuality and end of life care. Indeed, the very concepts of physician discernment, of independent clinical judgement, and of medicine as a moral profession, require that the profession allow physicians to refuse to provide interventions that they believe are immoral or inconsistent with their medical commitments. These range from refusing patients’ requests for antibiotics when in the physician’s judgment antibiotics are unwarranted, to refusing to provide abortion or physician-assisted suicide. This right and obligation of conscientious refusal has been reiterated again and again in medical codes of ethics over the past centuries and up to our day. Indeed it is implied directly by paragraph 1.3 of the Guides to Ethical Conduct and Behaviour which states, “Medical care must not be used as a tool of the State, to be granted or withheld or altered in character under political pressure. Doctors require independence from such pressures in order to carry out their duties.” As such, those who would allege that Dr. Boyle has acted unprofessionally are going against, not with, both historic and contemporary standards of medical ethics and practice.

Happily, the case was dropped, and Dr. Boyle remains free to practice medicine consistently with his conscience (and Church teaching).  The fact that the opinions of three prominent medical ethicists were required in order to establish Dr. Boyle's fitness to practice is astounding on its own, but at least some common sense prevailed in this case.