Protection of Conscience Project News
Service, not Servitude
Dr. Carmen Rodriguez, the president of the Asturias Medical College, the official physician’s association for the region of Asturias in the north of Spain, told a local paper that society can make laws concerning abortion, but cannot force physicians to participate in them. [LifeSite News]
Dr. Manuel Resa, a physician who has resisted attempts to force him to participate in abortions, has been granted an injunction by Superior Tribunal of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia in Spain. He appealed to the Tribunal after a lower court refused to grant the injunction. This means that Dr. Resa will not be forced to participate in abortion pending the outcome of his civil suit on seeking recognition of his freedom to refuse to facilitate abortion.
Former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that President Obama’s birth control regulation reminded him of President John F. Kennedy’s statement to the people of Berlin after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1963: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Huckabee,a Baptist, said, “In many ways, thanks to President Obama, we’re all Catholics now.”[ABC news]
Sisters for Life, a Catholic religious order in New York City, has protested the Department of Health and Human Services regulation that will force them to buy insurance coverage for surgical sterilization, contraceptives, and embryocidal drugs. [Statement]
The House Judiciary Committee in the Arizona state legislature has approved HB 2625, which will amend state legislation to provide a religious exemption to the state’s own mandate for insurance coverage for contraception. The amendment will also revoke the narrow definition of “religious employer” that was copied in the federal regulation at the centre of a controversy about religious freedom in the United States.