Is Pregnancy a Disease?

Here is a topic hot off the September-October 2014 Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal, that should raise a few eyebrows of agreement or rebuttal.

The point of the article is if pregnancy is NOT a disease then healthcare providers who refuse to perform abortions need not claim "conscience" as the basis for their refusal but claim that pregnancy and abortion are not part of what medicine has always been defined. The premise: "the scope of the very concept of medicine and disease circumscribes the scope of proper medical practice.  Procedures and activities that fall outside the scope of medicine and disease are not properly within the brief of healthcare personnel."

Currently, physicians and other healthcare providers can refuse to provide abortions if it is against their religious or moral views.  However, it also a social understanding that every employee 's responsibility toward his or her occupation in terms including of "taking on a job" depends specifically on the what society expects from those trained for that work.  You don't expect a plumber to perform an appendectomy or a physician to design or construct a highrise building as part of the criteria of the profession of medicine.  So the argument could be that the duty to perform the work of healthcare is set by the standards set by the work itself and to refuse an activity which has not been formally set is acceptable. Pregnancy itself is not a abnormal condition or disorder of a healthy life and therefore a disease and for a healthcare provider whose professional responsibility is to attend to the issues of disease or the prevention of disease, to be compelled to terminate a normal life function without a disease basis could be considered professionally unacceptable. What do you think? What view do you hold? ...Maurice.

Graphic: Pregnancy. From Google Images.