Louisiana Health Dept. Reverses Itself In “Morning-After” Pill Case

State Agrees To Provide Religious Accommodation For Nurse After Discrimination Complaint Filed With EEOC

News Release

American Center for Law and Justice

(New Orleans, LA) – The American Center for Law and Justice, an international public interest law firm committed to protecting life, announced today that the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals has reversed itself and has now agreed to stop discriminating against a public health nurse from New Orleans who was threatened with termination for refusing to dispense pregnancy-ending medication – a job requirement that violates her deeply held religious beliefs.

The move comes less than one week after the ACLJ filed formal complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Louisiana Commission on Human Rights contending that Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals is discriminating against the nurse because of her religious beliefs.

“We’re delighted that the religious beliefs of our client will now be accommodated in the workplace,” said Stuart J. Roth, Senior Counsel of the ACLJ, which is representing the nurse. “From the beginning, our client just wanted to do her job without violating her conscience and her religious beliefs. Unfortunately, it took formal action on our behalf and publicity about the case before the state agreed to do what it should have done all along – stop threatening and criticizing our client and permit her to work without violating her religious beliefs.

Last week, the ACLJ filed complaints with the EEOC and the Louisiana Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Cynthia Day of Marrero, Louisiana who is employed as a Public Health Nurse III with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Office of Public Health at a clinic in New Orleans. The complaints contend that Day repeatedly told her supervisors that she could not dispense what is known as an emergency contraception pill, also known as a “morning-after” pill – medication designed to end pregnancies. Day says she holds a sincere religious belief that human life, beginning at fertilization, is sacred and cannot be harmed in any way.

But instead of accommodating her beliefs, the complaints contend that Day was criticized for her beliefs and threatened with being fired. In fact, as the complaints were being filed last week, Day received a disciplinary letter from her employer – a letter proposing a five-day suspension without pay for insubordination.

Then, within days of filing the complaints and following publicity about the case, Day received a letter from Madeline W. McAndrew, Assistant Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Hospitals. In the letter dated October 25th, McAndrew said the Health Department “is rescinding the proposed action and will accommodate your request based on religious and moral grounds.” McAndrew told Day that she instructed officials to “immediately remove you from any duties that require you to discuss or provide the emergency contraception pill.” At the same time, McAndrew stated that a listing of “reassignment opportunities” will be made available to Day “for future permanent duty assignments to accommodate your request …”

“We plan to withdraw the complaints filed with the EEOC and with the Louisiana Commission on Human Rights when our client receives the accommodation,” said Roth. “We will continue to work with our client to ensure that her religious beliefs are accommodated and monitor the ongoing employment status very closely to make sure she is not discriminated against in the workplace.”

“This is a very important victory in one of the fastest growing areas of pro-life litigation – protecting the conscience rights of health care workers,” said Roth.

The resolution of the Louisiana case comes on the heels of a major federal court decision in California. In May 2002, the ACLJ successfully convinced a jury that Riverside County violated the constitutional rights of a former nurse who was fired from her job for refusing to dispense “morning-after” medication. A federal court jury found that the county violated her First Amendment rights of free speech, freedom of religion, and failed to reasonably accommodate her religious beliefs. Damages in that case – including a jury award and attorney’s fees – totaled $100,000.

The American Center for Law and Justice is an international public interest law firm specializing in constitutional law and protecting human life. The ACLJ is headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA.

No More Pro-Choice Movement

US Conference of Catholic Bishops
11 October, 2002

Reproduced with permission

Richard M.  Doerflinger*

Once there were basically two sides to the abortion debate.

One side said that, whatever the moral status of unborn life may be, a woman and her physician must be free to make a choice about abortion. The other side said that, whatever value the struggle for greater freedom may have in other contexts, responsible freedom for women and physicians must stop short     of destroying the life of an innocent child. Not surprisingly, these sides called themselves “pro-choice” and “pro-life” respectively.

Those were simpler times. For however useful these labels once were, it’s becoming ridiculous to refer to abortion advocacy groups as “pro-choice.”

This was already clear to anyone following the debate on U.S. funding of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) a few months ago. President Bush ultimately decided not to give this group any funds this year, because it helps the Chinese government implement a population program that uses coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization. His decision was greeted by howls of protest from pro-abortion groups, who ditched their commitment to women’s “reproductive freedom” to defend their allies in the population control movement.

More recently the coerced-abortion agenda has come home to guide domestic policy. When the House of Representatives debated a modest measure called the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act (ANDA) last month, the idea that each individual should have “freedom to choose” whether to be involved in abortion was denounced as heresy by “pro-choice” groups.

ANDA builds on a law that Congress passed in 1996 to protect medical residency programs from being forced by government bodies to provide abortions or abortion training. It clarifies and extends that law to make sure that this protection covers the full range of health care providers, so everyone can make his or her own conscientious decision whether to  participate in abortions. But to hear pro-abortion spokespersons talk, you would have thought that abortion was about to be declared a capital crime.     If  women can only get abortions from those actually willing to provide them,  they seemed to say, there will be almost no abortions  – an interesting comment on how widely accepted abortion is in the medical profession!

Pro-abortion groups opposed every aspect of this bill — including its effort to extend the conscience protection now enjoyed by doctors to cover other health professionals, such as nurses, who are mostly female. In opposing this modest step toward equal treatment, abortion advocates managed  to promote an agenda that was anti-life, “anti-choice,” and anti-woman all at the same time. Fortunately most House members ignored their tirades and approved the bill, which now goes to the Senate.

One bumper sticker produced by pro-abortion groups says: “Against abortion?     Don’t have one.” That slogan always ignored the unborn child, who has no opportunity to choose not to “have one.” But now women and doctors may join  the child in having their choice disregarded, unless pro-life legislators are vigilant.

Against abortion? If you’re in China, have one anyway. If you’re a health professional in the U.S., perform one anyway. Oddly, that is now what being  “pro-choice” is all about.

Pluralism, Religion and Public Policy

Preston Manning*

An address delivered at the McGill University conference on Pluralism, Religion and Public Policy.

People of faith – and there are millions of such people in Canada – need guidelines on how to bring faith perspectives to bear on public policy in a winsome rather than an offensive way. And public policy makers in our pluralistic society – many of whom regard faith perspectives with suspicion if not outright hostility – need to learn how to incorporate such perspectives into their deliberations rather than exclude them. . . 
Full Text

A Doctor’s Choice

The Washington Times
25 September, 2002.
Reproduced with permission

Dick Armey

Dick Armey was the Majority Leader (Republican)  in the U.S. House of Representatives when the following opinion column was written.

The vast majority of all hospitals – public and private – do not get involved in abortion. In fact, 86 percent of all hospitals did not  perform a single abortion last year.

There is a reason for that. Most  health care providers are interested in protecting and saving human life, not taking it. Government shouldn’t force them to take part in  actions – such as performing abortions – against their beliefs, morals or religion.

In 1996, Congress enacted legislation ending state and federal discrimination against health care providers that do not perform abortions.  In a series of court opinions and rulings, activist  judges are flouting the will of Congress and ordering hospitals, not to promote life, but to end it.  They are telling doctors and nurses to suspend their most strongly held beliefs and perform a practice so heinous that even progressive  hospitals have rejected.

So today, the House of Representatives will consider the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act (ANDA)  and right the wrong perpetrated by liberal courts.  The bill signals Congress’ intent in one simple yet powerful message – no health care provider should ever be forced to do something that violates their moral, ethical, or religious beliefs.

While there is deep disagreement in America about whether abortion  should be legal, nearly all Americans would agree that no one should be forced to have an abortion or to perform an abortion if they don’t want to. That, however, hasn’t stopped some on the extreme fringe of this  issue from trying to force hospitals to provide abortions anyway.

Valley Hospital in Palmer, Alaska, is one such example. Located about 50  miles east of Anchorage, the hospital’s board implemented a policy in 1990 barring abortion procedures except in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother.  The hospital was sued, and a judge arbitrarily ruled that because Valley Hospital received some government money, it was a “quasi-government entity” and had to provide         abortions. The hospital appealed the case to the Alaska Supreme Court, citing a state law that protected its right of conscience.  The Supreme Court ruled against the hospital and, in one fell swoop, threw out the state’s conscience law.

Congress’ conscience guarantees were also overturned in New Jersey. When Rancocas Hospital in Willingboro, N.J., was purchased by Our Lady of Lourdes Healthcare Services, a new policy was instituted against  performing abortions. Our Lady of Lourdes, as the name suggests, is a Catholic agency, and the Catholic church believes abortion is wrong.  The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey sued. It argued that  if Our Lady of Lourdes didn’t want to allow abortions in its hospital, it should provide a separate building on the hospital’s campus for  that purpose. This, obviously, made no sense to the hospital. The ACLU also argued that the hospital was duty-bound to provide abortions because its original mission statement called for “comprehensive” health care services. The ACLU conveniently forgot that when the mission statement was written in 1961, abortion was a felony.

So much is at stake in this bill. Without its passage, the viability and integrity of our country’s health care system are in jeopardy. In this age of managed care and  skyrocketing health care costs, hospitals are merging in order to survive. If courts demand that pro-abortion policies be a condition of merging – as a number already have – there will be fewer of these cost-saving partnerships.

Many of these alliances involve denominational hospitals – hospitals  principally organized to serve the poor and needy. They have been and will continue to be the first victims of court-imposed abortion mandates, for in many cases they cannot practice medicine at all under these conditions.  The poor and vulnerable will be the ultimate casualties when these facilities have to close.

The Unfree

 The National Review
25 September, 2002

Reproduced with permission

Katherine Jean Lopez

It’s still legal to oppose abortion, isn’t it?

You might think that any piece of legislation with the word “non-discrimination” in it is just about automatically headed for easy congressional passage. What politician wants to be on record as being in favor of discrimination?

Well, it’s just not so. At least if the issues involved are religion and abortion.

The House of Representatives is set to take up the (ANDA) this week. The goal of the bill is to protect Americans’ right to not have to pay for or otherwise  participate in abortions. Specifically, ANDA seeks to protect religious hospitals and other health-care providers (clinics, insurers, nurses, doctors) who are opposed, in conscience, to abortion, from having to have anything to do with them.

This has been one of the hottest “reproductive rights” issues over the last few years. Very few statehouses haven’t seen coercive bills seeking to force religious – often Catholic-hospitals to provide the whole gamut of so-called “reproductive health” services, including abortion, all in the name of “access.” Currently 49 states (the exception is Vermont) have some kind of conscience protection for health-care providers, though none of them are as comprehensive as the proposed ANDA bill-which covers all health-care “entities.”

In this regard, one of the favorite topics among abortion advocates recently has been hospital mergers. Planned Parenthood argues, in an action alert send out to supporters this week, that health-care institutions, whatever their affiliation, “operate in a secular sphere, and employ and serve people of diverse backgrounds and faiths. Thus, their claimed right to refuse to provide these services imposes serious burdens on people who do not share their religious views.”

The ANDA bill, says PP, “would allow the ‘conscience’ of the entity to  trump the ‘conscience’ and needs of the women they serve. . . . This is  wrong.”

What is not wrong, however, in Planned Parenthood’s estimation, is “the  entity” – i.e. actual private organizations and Americans – being forced by law to provide services that the people who make up the organizations  believe to be morally prohibited. In fact, these hospitals often believe the very essence of their work is founded on an opposition to the taking  of a human life. It’s a principle that all of medicine – whether the practitioners were religious, agnostic, or atheist – once considered at its very core.

Even a nonsectarian hospital can get in legal trouble  under the current regime. In Alaska, Valley Hospital’s (elected) board decided that it did not want to continue letting a community OB/GYN use hospital facilities to perform abortions. The board’s decision meant that abortion was no longer available at the hospital except in cases of “rape, incest, and danger to  the life of the mother – exactly the same policy the federal government  has had in Medicaid and its other health programs for many years,” as       board member Karen Vosburgh told the House Energy and Commerce committee this summer.

As Vosburgh told the committee, an Alaska court’s subsequent decision (upheld by the state supreme court) to prohibit Valley Hospital from  making such a decision “potentially places all hospitals in our state in a  ‘Catch-22’ situation. If you are a non-religious hospital you have no First Amendment claim of religious freedom, so you must provide abortions.  If you are a religious hospital with a ‘free exercise’ claim, respect for your right of conscience may be seen as showing favoritism to religion, so you may still have to provide abortions.”

It’s just not Planned Parenthood and the overt abortion-advocacy groups  actively opposing ANDA. The American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project sent a representative to the Hill earlier in the summer to argue that the bill would unfairly restrict women from abortion, contraception, and even simple counseling.

The groups lobbying against ANDA have grabbed the talking points from their anti-abortion folder without focusing on the actual legislation they are so enthusiastically opposing. In fact, if this were not the narrow clarification that ANDA is, pro-lifers would likely be debating amongst themselves, some saying that the bill does not go far enough into specifics, into the realm of abortifacient so-called contraception, for instance. But these are battles for another day-having nothing to do with this piece of legislation.

Simply put, this isn’t a bill about abortion politics. It’s a bill about freedom. What abortion advocates have been arguing when it comes to “access” is that they would see rather a hospital merger not go through-and a hospital potentially shut down – than allow a hospital to choose not to participate in what its employees and founders believe to be  murder of a human life. For them, this is not about freedom. Their opposition to ANDA is a backdoor way to oppose any restrictions on women getting abortions whenever, wherever. As Brigham Young University Law School professor Lynn Wardle has put it, “zealous abortion activists continue to try to use the powers of government to compel participation in and payment for and coverage of abortion. Specifically, they try to compel hospitals, clinics, provider groups, and health-care insurers to provide facilities  for, personnel for, and funding for abortion.”

In fact, despite the scare stories from those opposed to ANDA, federally funded abortions would still be possible under ANDA. Nor is this a bill that seeks to reverse Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that okayed abortion.  As a  fact sheet put out by the Catholic Bishops’ pro-life department notes, “States can ensure access to any abortions they fund without forcing specific providers against their will to provide these particular  abortions. A requirement that a state will contract only with a provider that offers absolutely every reimbursable service would be an enormous barrier to patients’ access to care, as few providers in any state could meet such a test.”

The case for the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act is a simple one, despite the heated rhetoric. As Pennsylvania congressman Joe Pitts put it at a hearing in July, “Abortion is an elective surgery. It is not prenatal care.  It is not basic health care, as some of our friends would like us to believe. Private hospitals should be able to decide what types of elective surgery they wish to offer. If they don’t want to provide abortions, they shouldn’t have to.”

That simplicity might give the bill a decent shot at passage. Tough sells on pro-life issues, like Republicans Tom Davis and Fred Upton, are cosponsoring ANDA. And some leading pro-life members – along with the Catholic bishops, an important voice on this issue in particular, given that there are over 600 Catholic hospitals in the U.S. (never mind other Catholic health-care entities) – are willing to push for this as a top priority for passage before the end of the year (likely as part of a lame-duck session, after the election). Rep. Pitts tells NRO: “I think there will be overwhelming support for the bill when it comes up for a vote.” In fact, as Pitts points out, even President Clinton signed a less comprehensive conscience-clause bill in1996. Cases like the Alaska one, however, make the need for ANDA clear.

In fact, for some members, ANDA is not at all different from what they voted for in 1996. Senator Olympia Snowe said on the Senate floor in 1996:   “[The amendment] does protect those institutions and those individuals who do not want to get involved in the performance or training of abortion when it is contrary to their beliefs . . . I do not think anyone would disagree with the fact – and I am pro-choice on this matter, but I do not  think anybody would disagree with the fact that an institution or an  individual who does not want to perform an abortion should do so contrary to their beliefs.”

She didn’t foresee how courts would interpret the law: as not including hospitals, because they are “quasi-public” entities. Of course, prospects in the Senate – as is so often the case – are murkier than in the House.

As Lynn Wardle noted in his testimony this summer, ANDA “is a very small,  but very important, step in the right direction.” Wardle tells NRO, “The  basic issue in the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act is forced abortion. A forced abortion occurs not only when a woman is forced to have an abortion  she does not want, but also when a health-care provider is forced to provide or participate in an abortion against her will. Even the Supreme  Court abortion cases are based on protecting voluntary choice. The right of individuals and organizations of individuals to choose in accord with their conscience to not have and to not participate in abortion must be protected against extremists who are trying to coerce others to provide abortion services that extremists want but which others find morally  repugnant.  That is what ANDA is about. It protects freedom of choice, the freedom not to be forced to perform or support abortion  against one’s moral beliefs.”

But then, for some, there are issues much more important than choice and non-discrimination: like making sure abortion is anything but rare. That’s why National Organization for Women calls ANDA “one of the most harmful  bills yet proposed.”