We've defended reproductive rights from religiously motivated restrictions since our founding.
Religion should not stand in the way of reproductive healthcare.
A desire to restrict reproductive rights, and to control women's bodies, is a hallmark of religious fundamentalism. We strongly support the right of women to have legal and safe abortions and access to emergency contraception.
Since its founding the National Secular Society has supported reproductive rights. In 1878 our founder and vice-president were prosecuted for making information about birth control accessible to working class women.
Throughout the world, reproductive rights are still under threat from theocrats. While individual religious people hold diverse views on abortion, every stage of progress in reproductive healthcare has been fought by religious organisations. Often these have involved virulent campaigns of intimidation and misinformation.
84% of people in the UK believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This includes 76% of religious people and 94% of nonreligious people.
In the UK, emergency contraception can still sometimes be difficult to obtain. Some religious pharmacists have defied General Pharmaceutical Council guidance by refusing to sell it or even to dispense a prescription given to a woman after a consultation with her own doctor.
People of all religions and beliefs can have disagreements on the boundaries of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. However, religious beliefs should not be used to restrict the bodily autonomy of other people.
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Latest updates
Pharmacists must put patient care before religious beliefs
Posted: Wed, 29 Jun 2016 15:31
Secularists have urged the General Pharmaceutical Council to ensure that pharmacists set aside their personal religious beliefs if they conflict with a patient's medical needs.
Writing in a consultation response to the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) on "Standards for pharmacy professionals", the Secular Medical Forum said granting unrestricted rights to pharmacy professionals to express their own views places the rights of people who use pharmacy services at risk.
Secular medics said the professional standards must do more than call for "balance" between a pharmacist's "personal values and beliefs" and the "care they give people who use pharmacy services".
The SMF said that this language was "unhelpful" and "ambiguous" because of how "balance" could be interpreted by pharmacists.
"There is a significant risk that those pharmacy professionals with strong personal views, almost always religious" will favour their "own personal views," the Forum warned.
"The result of this may be care determined by the beliefs and values of the professional rather than person-centred care. This risks disadvantaging the person trying to access pharmacy services whose own values and beliefs may be overlooked in favour of those of the pharmacy professional."
The Forum called for the GPhC to provide greater clarity in their new guidance by giving examples to pharmacists and "clear advice" for situations "where conflict arises between a pharmacy professional's own views and that of a person accessing services."
If there is a conflict, the SMF said, "person-centred professional care relies on pharmacy professionals setting aside their own personal beliefs where necessary".
The SMF argued that in some circumstances religious objections could not be worked around.
Antony Lempert, chair of the SMF, said: "Where a lone pharmacist is working in a rural community it would be unacceptable to refuse to dispense or to try to redirect a patient to another pharmacy. The responsibility here lies mainly with the pharmacist who has such objections to make sure they do not accept a job which would place them in this predicament".
"There is a fundamental and important distinction between holding a belief and the unrestricted expression of that belief."
"It is essential to place reasonable limits on the unrestricted expression of the personal views of trained healthcare professionals," he said.
In a separate submission to the GPhC, the National Secular Society proposed that new standards for pharmacists should echo the decision of the US Supreme Court, which this week declined to hear an appeal from a pharmacy in Washington State which had "cited Christian beliefs in objecting to providing emergency contraceptives to women".
The appellate court concluded that the State had a "legitimate interest in ensuring that its citizens have safe and timely access to their lawful and lawfully prescribed medications". The court also accepted the right of a "religiously objecting individual pharmacist to deny delivery, so long as another pharmacist working for the pharmacy provides timely delivery".
Keith Porteous Wood, NSS executive director, said: "Conscience opt outs that result in the failure to provide timely delivery of lawful and lawfully prescribed medications are not acceptable.
"Pharmacists are under a professional obligation to serve customers, and to permit such refusals could cause hardship and potential danger and potentially breaches their human rights."
Commenting on the US Supreme Court's decision, the American Civil Liberties Union said: "When a woman walks into a pharmacy, she should not fear being turned away because of the religious beliefs of the owner or the person behind the counter."
Religious rules in US Catholic hospitals putting female patients in danger
Posted: Tue, 23 Feb 2016 12:01
A report leaked to the Guardian has exposed extraordinary risks taken with the health of female patients by forcing them to undergo unsafe miscarriages.
Guidelines from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops forbid termination of pregnancies and state that "Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted."
According to a report by a former health official the implementation of this religious guidance has resulted in serious risks being taken with women's health.
The report, made public for the first time, considers the cases of five female patients from Michigan and accuses Mercy Health, a Catholic healthcare provider, of making women endure dangerous miscarriages instead of providing reasonable medical alternatives.
According to the report, Mercy Health has made what the Guardian has described as "unilateral healthcare choices for … five women without their knowledge or their consent."
Many other cases like this have been reported. In 2010 an Arizona woman suffered "life-threatening complications" after hospital administrators told her that she could not have an emergency termination because the foetus still had a heartbeat, despite just a "miniscule" chance of the foetus surviving.
She was told that continuing with the pregnancy would put her at risk "of severe bleeding and infection" and that she needed to have an emergency termination of the pregnancy but that the hospital would not perform the procedure because doctors had to "abide by the church's ethical and religious directives." She had to be sent to a different hospital, causing a three-hour delay.
Catholic control of American hospitals and influence in the American healthcare system has significantly increased in recent years. Between 2001 and 2011 there was a 16% increase in the number of US hospitals affiliated with the Catholic Church.
Doctor Antony Lempert of the UK Secular Medical Forum commented: "These terrible stories of women reportedly denied information, choice and safe medical care highlight the sometimes extreme dangers of allowing religious ideology to usurp good medical practice. The irony that women's lives are devalued and placed at increased risk in institutions premised on religious dogma and claiming to value human life seems lost on the hospitals' standard-bearers.
"The universally-accepted code of medical ethics places patient autonomy, i.e. personal control over what happens to a patient's own body, as the bedrock of good medical practice. Maternal mortality is not a spectre from the past but an ongoing, largely preventable tragedy that accounts for the death of a woman somewhere in the world approximately every 2 minutes. Preventing women from exercising choice about what happens to their own bodies is bad enough in the case of normal pregnancies but when complications arise which place women at increased risk of dying there should be no question that women should be fully informed about the safest, medically-recommended, evidence-based course of action. It would appear that in these cases, the course of action that would ordinarily be recommended by doctors has sometimes not even been discussed with the patient herself for fear of deviating from Catholic doctrine.
"We have seen similar tragedies nearer to home such as the case of Savita Halapannavar, the non-Catholic Irish dentist who died of a protracted, complicated miscarriage in an Irish hospital on 28th October 2012 shortly after being denied a necessary abortion and being told by religiously-motivated healthcare professionals that 'This is a Catholic Hospital'."
