Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars
Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars
Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars
Description
Description
Amid historic restrictions on abortion, puberty blockers, and assisted suicide, a health-law expert exposes America's broken system of medical conscience, which shields clinicians who refuse evidence-based care yet offers no protections to those who provide prohibited treatment.
Pitched battles over abortion, puberty blockers, and assisted suicide have turned American healthcare into a legal minefield. Faced with mounting restrictions on medical practice, doctors and nurses who follow their conscience to provide standard treatments risk being fined, fired, or even imprisoned, while clinicians who conscientiously deny evidence-based care are shielded without condition from any such consequences. Dov Fox argues that by ceding the moral vocabulary of conscience to refusers alone, the lopsided law of medical conscience selectively burdens providers, drives vulnerable patients underground, and impoverishes the dynamic pluralism of medicine. The Conscience of Care lays bare the broken system of medical conscience and sets out to fix it. Fox canvases a landscape of contested services that include IVF, IUDs, opioids, psychedelics, organ transplants, and advance directives. He develops practical reforms that rebalance conscience protection by introducing measured safeguards for providers and scaling back the categorical refuge afforded to refusers. The Conscience of Care articulates a bold vision of medicine that reclaims the lost promise of conscience to bridge social divides on matters of life and death, impairment and identity.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
With examples drawn from arenas including but not limited to reproductive care, transgender care, pain management, and end-of-life care, Fox works through a medical landscape littered with oft-hidden but ever-growing religious accommodations, legal loopholes, and political minefields.--Ronit Y. Stahl "Science" (1/8/2026 12:00:00 AM)
Dov Fox's pioneering work shines a much-needed light on the importance of protecting conscientious providers of prohibited care - an issue that could not be more timely.--I. Glenn Cohen, Harvard Law School
A groundbreaking and deeply informed exploration of the stark asymmetries in the legal treatment of conscientious refusal and provision in medicine. Mandatory reading for anyone concerned about medical ethics and the evolving roles of government in healthcare.--Anita L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Never before have doctors faced such severe restrictions on whom they treat or how. Dov Fox presents a bold, urgent vision for resolving these pressing controversies of our time. Elegantly written and meticulously reasoned, this book makes real moral progress and bridges ideological divides: liberal and conservative, religious and secular.--Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford
A must-read. A cutting-edge account showing how American law fails to support doctors who invoke conscience to provide care. Dov Fox offers an inclusive vision of conscience that can model respect across political disagreement.--Reva Siegel, Yale Law School
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Pub date:
2025-12-02
Length:
224 pages
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