Many parents… are not philosophically opposed to the concept of vaccination and do not object to every vaccine. However, they are philosophically opposed to government health officials having the power to intimidate, threaten, and coerce them into violating their deeply held conscientious beliefs in the event they conclude that either vaccination in general or, more commonly, a particular vaccine is not appropriate for their children.
The principle of informed consent to medical treatment, which has become a central ethical principle in the practice of modern medicine and is applied to medical interventions which involve the risk of injury or death. Implicit in the concept of informed consent is the right to refuse consent or, in the case of vaccination laws, the right to exercise conscientious, personal belief or philosophical exemption to mandatory use of one or more vaccines.
Informed Consent: An Ethical Principle
The right to informed consent as an overarching ethical principle in the practice of medicine for which vaccination should be no exception. We maintain this is a responsible and ethically justifiable position to take in light of the fact that vaccination is a medical intervention performed on a healthy person that has the inherent ability to result in the injury or death of that healthy person.The Paternalistic Medical Model Under Challenge
The reason that informed consent has been increasingly adopted, since World War II, as the guiding ethical principle governing the patient-physician relationship, is as deeply rooted in the comparatively new discipline of political science as it is in more ancient philosophies. At the heart of medicine’s struggle to come to grips with a human being’s right to informed consent to medical intervention, is a challenge to one tenet of the Hippocratic philosophy in the practice of medicine, that is, that the physician and the physician alone should determine which medical intervention will benefit the patient.
