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

Mission statements offer limited benefit when patients do not have meaningful choices about where to seek care and can be misused.

This article canvasses states’ legal prohibitions and challenges to them and considers consequences for clinicians and patients.

Extraordinary changes to the legal landscape of abortion care require reevaluating health professionals’ appropriation of conscience.

Dr Isa Ryan joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Dr Ashish Premkumar and Professor Katie Watson: “Why the Post-Roe Era Requires Protecting Conscientious Provision as We Protect Conscientious Refusal in Health Care.”

Educators discussing ethically challenging topics with students should try to cultivate open mindedness while illuminating potential negative consequences that their health practice beliefs—such as refusing to provide abortion care—can have for patients, particularly those with limited options.

Protecting one’s moral integrity may require a conscience clause that protects positive conscience claims by permitting individuals to perform actions that are otherwise prohibited by legal or institutional rules.

Society is best served by an approach to conscience that combines a progressive understanding of patients’ needs, a nuanced determination of when those needs translate into claims, and a limited role for conscientious refusal.

Physicians must recognize the role of their own and patients’ religious and personal values in understanding and resolving dilemmas in clinical ethics.

Legislative policies that require a physician to misrepresent the risks of abortion to patients and to show the patient an ultrasound and those that allow physicians not to provide referral for abortion create a conflict between the physician's obligations to the patient and to the law.