Congratulations to Associate Professor Ronit Stahl, who has been named a Greenwall Faculty Scholar. The Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics is a career development award to enable junior faculty members to carry out innovative bioethics research. It supports research that goes beyond current work in bioethics to help resolve pressing ethical issues in clinical, biomedical, and public health decision-making, policy, and practice, and creates a community that enhances future bioethics research by Scholars and Alumni/ae.
Stahl’s project, “Troubling Conscience: Autonomy and Authority in Religious Hospitals,” will illuminate how religious hospitals crafted, acquired, and invoked institutional conscience rights to restrict and refuse care. From the abstract: "Institutional conscience rights structure the relationship between hospitals, clinicians, and patients by limiting information, care, and referrals based on the authority of religious doctrine. Why, then, are private, religious hospitals eligible to partner with public entities and receive government funds while simultaneously invoking religious freedom to deny patients needed care? This project focuses on how religious hospitals crafted, acquired, and invoked institutional conscience rights to restrict and refuse care. From the perspective of bioethics: whose authority and autonomy matter in religious health care? How can tensions between bioethical values and religious values be resolved?"