Social Workers, Conscience Protection and Practice

Abstract

This is a review of conscience protection law and ethics in social work from different perspectives. The article's definitional work on professional and personal conscience decision-making processes seeks to clarify the professional conversation on conscience issues in social work with some focus on participation in the abortion decision as an example.

Keywords:

• conscience protection
• abortion
• social work
• religion
• decision making

Notes

1. Client self-determination (Biestek, 1957) recognizes the possibility of each person's capacity for action and responsibility for his/her actions and/or outcomes. In this process the social worker helps persons to act, gradually to become free moral agents (Constable, 1989, 2007, 2012).

2. “Case” implies a bureaucratic understanding, precisely the reverse of what is meant by casus because it eliminates the person's understanding, the circumstances and taking of responsibility. Rather than focus on a person's taking of responsibility and acting, it shifts the focus to some type of standardized external judgment.

3. In formal cooperation one intends the wrongful act of another. In material cooperation one does not join the principal agent in the wrongful intent, but nevertheless assists him/her by an act not in itself wrong (Higgins, 1948, p. 353).

4. This is required by the Code when the client requests something that the person cannot competently provide.