This piece is neatly typical of its kind. Chock full of near-facts, straw men and leaps of logic.

"It certainly left its mark on Ava Gardner, the American leading lady. 'On The Beach is a story about the end of the world,' she told the press, 'and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it'."

Not a good start.

http://150.theage.com.au/view_bestofarticle.asp?intid=659

Then comes the straw-man.

"But what would happen if a 14-year-old girl requested to be circumcised? ...Would MPs force a conscientious objector to refer the girl to a colleague down the corridor who specialises in genital mutilation?"

Enlighten me. Is genital mutilation legal in Victoria? I thought not. Straw-man.

And then there's the usual slime attack on those who take responsibility for their own decisions.

"'The right to act according to the dictates of our conscience is founded in the value of autonomy,' she says. 'Autonomy means self-rule. An autonomous person is one who is free to direct her life according to her own values.' In short, Ms Cannold is a relativist."

And the crime of the relativist is described as:

"her kind of conscience makes arbitrary, even capricious, choices. It is just a whim, like choosing between Colgate and Ipana, or painting your bathroom Autumn Peach or Twilight Rose, or ordering mango or chocolate chip ice cream."

That is of course the opinion of everyone who believes that their lives should be governed by others. But the evidence to support that opinion is extremely thin.

"A well-oiled conscience makes its choices based on reason and evidence, not on whimsy."

Having declared Ms Cannold's decisions to be whimsical, the article uses that at the logical base of their discrimination of a "well-oiled conscience".

What is absent here is any form of justification. It is the logical equivalent of my declaring that Christianity is merely a capricious whim, and deduce all further argument from that starting-point.

A conscience, by definition, is a personal quality.

If one simply follows someone else's rules, then - as was claimed at Nuremberg - conscience cannot, and does not, play any part.

Hows this for a Straw man, If the Author was in a car accident and was badly injured, would him be happy that the emergency doctors religious views ment that he would rather see him die then give him a blood transfusion? What about if the he was charged with touching kids, would he be okay with all the lawyers not wanting to defend a child molester? Or what about a Police officer only enforcing the laws he/she personally agreed with. In some community service roles you have to work to the states laws not your own. If you don’t want to , it’s easy find a different job.

Get of it the bulk of the community want these changes and we should not be held up by a bunch of fringe fanatics

You Pro-lifers must really hate God for designing such a cruel reproductive system. Nature kills off about 60% of "human life" if you believe the "Pro Life" line: God is such a bastard!
Seriously folks, calling a bundle of cells "human" and then treating them as the moral equivilent of a human adult is perverse.
Another thing is: The law is a social instrument, not a moral one. Stupid laws that prohibit things that people will find a way of doing anyway, for moral (read "everyone is different") reasons generate *much* more pain than they save.
By all means lecture, advertise and convince...but don't kill women and enrich crimminals by using the law to promote *your* morality.
Oh, and curtailing a doctor's power to bar a woman from her choice of action is not harming "conscientious objection"...it is protecting the woman from doctors who confuse medicine with opinion.
If they cannot convince the woman to change, then it is indeed their *duty* to do the right thing by their patient.

A Doctor whose conscience prohibits him from addressing the expressed requests of his patient has no right to deny that patient a procedure which is legal and available from other doctors.

In short, every doctors conscience is subordinate to the needs of their patients.

Anything otherwise would amount to a defense of a doctors personal decisions to employ indiscriminate actions, above and before the patient needs and rights.

Some doctors need to understand, they are service providers, not God Almighty

Exactly Col

You write

'Some doctors need to understand, they are service providers, not God Almighty'

In other words they should be saving life and not killing it. Leave the day of our death to God not those who find babies inconvenient.

I don't wish to go into the ethics of abortion but the bottom line has always been this. A woman can be pregnant without anyone else knowing. When the pregnancy is unwanted, that woman can take steps to end the pregnancy. If safe abortions aren't legally available, desperate women will try other methods to end the pregnancy. If it works, the pregnancy is terminated and no one is the wiser. However, the 'backyard' methods are crude and dangerous, and the health of the woman and the foetus can be horrifically compromised by them.

In short, abortions will always happen whether narrow-minded men like runner like it or not. Anti-choice activists would just prefer women to die instead of a bunch of cells.