Competing Ethical Claims in Abortion

Abstract

In cases of abortion, as in all cases of nursing care, the nurse has the ethical obligation to provide the best nursing care possible without judging the rightness or wrongness of the patient's action or behavior. Several staff nurses at a small community hospital in the United States personally believe that abortion is ethically wrong. This personal belief is reinforced for many by their religious belief system. Because of a rotation policy at this hospital, all nurses will be assigned to work in the abortion clinic, and this presents several problems. Initially, there is the ethical dilemma of an individual nurse's personal-religious value system, and the obligation to self to live according to it. This is in opposition to the ethical obligation to care for all patients. The nursing administration also faces an ethical problem related to enforcing this policy in the fairest way possible. Another problem for the nursing administration is a legal obligation to make sure that all patients receive adquate nursing care. The nurses at this 1 community hospital asked to meet with the nursing administratio for the purpose of discussing the issue of working in the abortion clinic. The meeting took place and though exploration of value systems and issues and through mutual willingness to compromise without being compromised, decisions to resolve the dilemma were reached. It was agreed that nurses would not be made to rotate into the abortion clinic against their religious beliefs and that nurses who did not have that ethical stance would work there.