When a clinician refuses to do a procedure consistent with standard of care for a patient, legal resources can be helpful.

This narrative illuminates need for students and clinicians to be well prepared to face ethically and structurally complex realities of identifying and responding to children.

Clinicians using governing authority to make public health policy are ethically obliged to draw upon scientific and clinical information that accords professional standards.

Dialogue-based learning can help medical students recognize, acknowledge, and overcome their biases.

An argument that the concept of judicious dissent can resolve the debate over a physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to provide lawful services.

An argument that an individual physician’s conscience-based decision not to offer specific, lawful medical services should not restrict patients’ access to those services.

With good planning and good will, medical professionals’ right of conscience and patients’ rights to controversial services can be both protected and accommodated.