Pro-Choice Maryland

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Warsaw's mayor said Wednesday she fired the head of a maternity hospital who refused to perform or facilitate an abortion of a badly deformed fetus for reasons of conscience.

The case — which saw the recently delivered baby put under intensive care with major brain and skull deformity — has stirred wide debate in Polish media, raising questions about the boundaries of faith in public life in a country that is traditionally Catholic but increasingly becoming secular.

Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz said she fired obstetrician Bogdan Chazan, a declared Catholic, over the case. She said a review showed that Chazan refused to perform an abortion toward the end of the legally-allowed period and failed to advise the woman on where an abortion was available and on the approaching deadline.

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Warsaw's Roman Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, said that the sacking of Chazan amounted to a "dangerous precedent that hurt the rights not only of the Catholics, but of all people."
The guy didn't get fired because he flat out refused doing the abortion, Mr. Nycz. He got fired because he failed to do a legal obligation of directing the patient to another doctor, who was probably more willing to help them out. However, the rights of those who are religious shouldn't always trumph the rights of other people, especially if their life is in danger. Should the rights of a person who needs a blood transfusion, for example, be trumph because a JW doctor has an issue with blood transfusions? Should the rights of a woman who needs an abortion to save her life (i.e ectopic pregnancy) be trumph because a doctor of faith (or no faith since atheists can be against abortion too) has a moral issue with abortion?

If a doctor cannot do their job, regardless the reason why they don't want to carry out a particular procedure, they should find someone else to do their job. If they can't do that, they shouldn't be in medicine then.

Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?

To answer this, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.

Its quality-of-life index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically significant indicators into account. They are a mixed bunch: some are fixed factors, such as geography; others change only very slowly over time (demography, many social and cultural characteristics); and some factors depend on policies and the state of the world economy.

A forward-looking element comes into play, too. Although many of the drivers of the quality of life are slow-changing, for this ranking some variables, such as income per head, need to be forecast. We use the EIU’s economic forecasts to 2030, which is roughly when children born in 2013 will reach adulthood.

What are your thoughts about this? I'm not surprised that the country I'm currently residing is in the top 5.