Service, not Servitude
The new Spanish government, which replaced the former socialist government in November elections, plans to revise the country’s abortion law. It had promised to “change the current legislative model relating to abortion in order to reinforce the protection of the right to life as well as female minors”. [AFP]
A protection of conscience bill has been proposed in New Hampshire, one of only three states that lack protective legislation for health care workers. House Bill 1653 offers protection for individuals, though not for institutions. It is opposed by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Association. [Nashua Telegraph]
Alliance Defence Fund
January 24th, 2012
Reproduced with permission
Thirty-nine years ago the United States Supreme Court recognized that medical professionals, let alone others, have a right not to assist in abortions in violation of their conscience. What’s that? Yes, I do have the date right. I’m talking about Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. While those cases held, wrongly, that women and their doctors have a fundamental constitutional right to kill an unborn child, they also recognized as important predicates to those decisions the right NOT to participate in abortion in violation of one’s conscience. Friday’s announcement that the Obama Administration would force employers – including nonprofit religious employers – to pay for their employees’ contraception and abortifacients is just the latest example of how the abortion industry and its friends in the Obama Administration are attacking these well established rights of conscience in ways even the authors of Roe and Doe did not envision.
Even at the time of Roe, some were concerned that legalized abortion would lead to compelled participation in abortion, a concern that was not misplaced as ACLU attorneys were working in Montana to force Catholic hospitals to perform sterilizations. The Supreme Court acknowledged but dismissed that concern, holding only that “the attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, … the patient’s pregnancy should be terminated.” The Court cited favorably the resolution of the AMA House of Delegates stating:
RESOLVED, That no physician or other professional personnel shall be compelled to perform any act which violates his good medical judgment. Neither physician, hospital, nor hospital personnel shall be required to perform any act violative of personally held moral principles. In these circumstances, good medical practice requires only that the physician or other professional personnel withdraw from the case so long as the withdrawal is consistent with good medical practice.
Similarly, in Doe v. Bolton while the Supreme Court struck down some parts of a Georgia abortion law, it left standing a provision that allowed any medical professional or hospital to decline to participate in abortions, saying that this provision was an “appropriate protection to the individual and to the denominational hospital.” Thus, in the seminal abortion decisions that President Obama and the abortion industry celebrate this weekend, the same Court acknowledged the right NOT to assist in abortions in violation of conscience.
To be absolutely sure however, the U.S. Congress passed the Church Amendments, turning back ACLU efforts to treat Catholic hospitals receiving Medicare funds as public hospitals and force them to perform sterilizations (and ultimately abortions), and prohibiting recipients of certain federal funds from requiring medical professionals or any person to participate in abortions, sterilizations, or other procedures in violation of conscience. This was so uncontroversial it passed with only a single vote against in either house – a vote total unthinkable even for a bill to honor mom and apple pie today. In fact, noted right wing extremist Senator Ted Kennedy spoke in favor of the law on the floor of the Senate, saying that it protected the constitutional right not to participate in abortion and he supported the “full protection to the religious freedom of physicians and others.” In 1973, as the opinions reflect, there was no doubt that whatever right the penumbral emanations of the constitution gave to women and doctors to participate in abortions, it certainly protected the right not to participate in abortions or other medical procedures that violated one’s conscience.
It is in the face of this history that the Obama Administration announced on Friday that it will, with only a 1 year reprieve, fine virtually every faith-based ministry in the country that does not pay for contraception and abortifacients (Plan B, Ella, IUD, etc. included). This decision is certainly an affront to religious liberty –perhaps the greatest in our nation’s history. But it is also completely unsupported, indeed rejected by the very cases that the Obama Administration would use to support its cause. Roe and Doe, as bad as those decisions are, reject the Administration’s claim that a woman’s “right” to contraception and abortifacients justify the federal government compelling Christ-centered ministries to violate their conscience by buying these for them. When you hear abortion industry supporters rely upon those decisions to justify this assault on conscience, don’t believe it. Even Roe itself is conservative compared to the radical anti-life advocacy of the present Administration.
NEWS RELEASE
Today, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization – criticized the decision announced late last Friday by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services denying requests to respect the conscience of religiously affiliated organizations in what benefits they are compelled to provide in their employees’ health insurance plans.
The Affordable Care Act requires that employer-provided health insurance plans must include contraception and related “preventative” services to employees free of charge. The law provides an exemption from this requirement to houses of worship and other religious institutions whose primary purpose is religious.
A diverse coalition of religious groups and institutions petitioned the Administration to expand this exemption to include a broader spectrum of religiously affiliated institutions. On Friday, the Obama Administration declined this request and ruled that, after one year, religious entities that employ people of other faiths on their staff or provides services to people of other faiths must include contraception and other preventative services in their employee insurance plans.
OU Executive Director for Public Policy Nathan Diament issued the following statement commenting on the Administration action:
In declining to expand the religious exemption within the healthcare reform law, the Obama Administration has disappointingly failed to respect the needs of religious organizations such as hospitals, social welfare organizations and more.
Most troubling, is the Administration’s underlying rationale for its decision, which appears to be a view that if a religious entity is not insular, but engaged with broader society, it loses its “religious” character and liberties. Many faiths firmly believe in being open to and engaged with broader society and fellow citizens of other faiths. The Administration’s ruling makes the price of such an outward approach the violation of an organization’s religious principles. This is deeply disappointing. The Orthodox Union will support legislation in Congress to reverse this policy.
NEWS RELEASE
WASHINGTON—Both the president of the U.S. bishops and the bishops’ Pro-Life chairman called on the thousands of Catholics gathered for the National Prayer Vigil for Life to speak out for the protection of conscience rights and religious liberty.
“From a human point of view, we may be tempted to surrender, when our government places conception, pregnancy and birth under the ‘center for disease control,’ when chemically blocking conception or aborting the baby in the womb is considered a ‘right’ to be subsidized by others who abhor it,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) at the vigil’s closing Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on January 23.
His words referred to the January 20 announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that nearly all employers will be forced to cover drugs and procedures that violate their conscience in their health insurance plans.
“When the ability of feeding, housing, and healing the struggling of the world is curtailed and impeded if one does not also help women abort their babies, one can hardly be faulted for being tempted to the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ and just consider all as lost,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said.
Addressing the opening Mass the previous evening, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston and chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, excoriated the HHS rule.
“Never before in our US History has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase what violates our beliefs. At issue here as our President of the Conference stated it this past Friday, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for conscience and religious liberty,” said Cardinal DiNardo.
He cited the January 19 address of Pope Benedict XVI to U.S. bishops visiting Rome, in which the pope said, “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be appreciated at every level of ecclesial life.”
Cardinal DiNardo said that the pope had “nailed” the issue in light of the HHS announcement and tied the issue directly to the March for Life. “His calls for courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public life and debate have targeted the issues we face in our pro-life efforts, to defend those who defend human life and to defend their religious liberty!”