LONDON (CNS) — British physicians opposed to euthanasia could face discrimination under new medical guidelines on how to treat dying patients, said a Catholic archbishop.

Guidelines drafted by the General Medical Council, the regulatory body for the medical profession, were insufficient to protect doctors who believed “passive euthanasia” was morally wrong, said a June 30 written submission by Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff, Wales, as part of a public consultation. The draft guidelines include a conscience clause that allows doctors to opt out of starving and dehydrating incapacitated patients to death, a practice legalized in 1993.

Archbishop Smith, chairman of the English and Welsh bishops’ Department for Christian Responsibility and Citizenship, said that disagreements were most likely to arise in the context of clinical judgments precisely on such matters as “respecting a valid applicable refusal of clinically assisted nutrition and dehydration by someone who was not dying, especially someone who was in a ‘persistent vegetative state.'”

He voiced concern that the guidelines say medics could not object “without first ensuring that arrangements have been made for another doctor to take over.” Archbishop Smith said the requirement would put junior physicians with conscientious objections to euthanasia at particular risk.