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Zagreb - Members of the parliamentary Committee on health and social policy on Friday had a constructive discussion on conscientious objection, not disputing doctors' right to it, however, some participants in the discussion stressed that it must not jeopardise women's right to pregnancy termination.
The State Secretary at the Health Ministry, Silvio Bašić, said that the violation of patients' rights was not due to conscientious objection but due to irresponsible behaviour of individuals who should answer for it.
A doctor's right to conscientious objection and a woman's legal right to abortion do not rule one another out. Each licenced hospital in Croatia must perform non-medical pregnancy termination and the Ministry and heads of medical institutions and competent services have the obligation to create conditions so that both rights can be exercised, he said.
To secure the right to abortion, the Health Ministry has underlined the legal obligation for hospitals to report pregnancy terminations to the Croatian Public Health Institute, and the Ministry periodically collects data on the number of doctors who are conscientious objectors, instead of individual lists, so as to have a system of control, he said.
Referring to international legal standards, Public Ombudswoman Tena Šimonović-Einwalter said that the right to conscientious objection was not an absolute right and could be restricted in certain circumstances whereas in the health system it must not pose an obstacle to the exercise of the right to health.
There exists a problem in Croatian hospitals because the right to conscientious objection hampers the exercise of women's right to health, so the matter needs to be regulated better, she said.
The head of the Croatian Medical Chamber, Krešimir Luetić, said that both rights were unquestionable and that gynecology was a broad medical branch not limited to one procedure.
The vice-president of the Association of Hospital Doctors, Boris Ujević, said that it was wrong to say that a gynecologist who was a conscientious objector should not work in the public health sector because that would restrict women's right to health care as there were not enough gynecologists and few of them were skilled in all the 125 competencies of that area of medicine.
The head of the Croatian Association for Patients' Rights, Jasna Karačić, said that one of the solutions could be abortion with pills.
A subspecialist in human reproduction, Erden Radončić, was of the opinion that conscientious objection causes system obstruction, and he pointed to the difference between objective conscientious objection, such as in the testing of new drugs, and the subjective approach.