Broadening conscience? Positive conscientious objection against migrant healthcare exclusion

Abstract

This work is aimed to analyze the difficulty of establishing clear limits between conscientious objection and civil disobedience taken as example the specific case of those healthcare professionals opposed to the Spanish Royal Decree 16/2012. The approval of this law, directed to the sustainability of the National Health System, meant a change in the previous configuration of the constitutional right to healthcare, characterized by being public and freely accessible to all the inhabitants in the country. As a consequence, undocumented migrant people had no longer a universal access to healthcare. In this situation, some healthcare professionals expressed their opposition to the law providing their services to undocumented patients. Might this behavior be considered a form of conscientious objection? Was a case of civil disobedience? Was just an act of altruism? Plausible answers to these questions will be argued along this paper.