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Prejudice must not poison the testing of doctors

Gerald Warner writes on the new report from Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer for England and Wales, entitled 'Medical Revalidation: Principle and Next Steps'. The report proposes, for the first time, a system of regular reappraisal of the competence of all doctors.

Yet there are serious concerns implicit to the Donaldson proposals. We live in a time when every area of life is politicised to an unprecedented degree, and medicine is one of the battlegrounds. Is it not likely that the relicensing process could become the occasion, every year, of putting pressure on doctors to conform to the politically correct ethics that, with strong impetus from the Government, are insidiously usurping the Hippocratic code?

Further pressure, for example, could be brought to bear on doctors who conscientiously oppose abortion ... There is also a shift within the policy-prescribing, opinion-forming elite of the medical profession towards euthanasia and assisted suicide.

In the present climate, when a politically correct, viciously anti-Christian orthodoxy has seized all the commanding heights in public life, the professions and the media, it is crucial that the further progress of this hydra be obstructed. The next decade will see trench warfare conducted by Christians and compassionate humanists against the state-sponsored culture of death. It is vital that no weapon should inadvertently be handed to the forces of darkness.

Full story at Scotland on Sunday.