Tag: Christian Medical Association (USA)

Christian Medical Association calls HHS regulation an assault on First Amendment

The 16,000-member Christian Medical Association has protested the Obama admininstration’s plan to force objecting employers to provide insurance coverage for surgical sterilization, contraceptives, and  embryocidal drugs.  CMA CEO Dr. David Stevens said that the regulation “violates the First Amendment rights and sensibilities of any individual or organization morally committed to life-honoring faith principles,” adding that it  “tramples the conscience rights of health care professionals” and  “fits a deplorable pattern of disregard for First Amendment freedoms.” [News release]

 

CMA Physicians, former HHS Asst. Secretary decry Obama administration’s regulatory action on conscience and discrimination.

NEWS RELEASE

Christian Medical Association

Washington, DC, February 18, 2011 — The 16,000-member Christian Medical Association (CMA, www.cmda.org) today protested the decision of the Obama administration to weaken the only federal regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in health care.

Dr. J. Scott Ries, a board-certified family physician and CMA’s vice president for Campus & Community Ministries, said, “The administration has made changes in a vital civil rights regulation without evidence or justification. The administration presented no evidence of any problems in healthcare access, prescriptions or procedures that have occurred in the two years since the original regulation’s enactment that would justify any change in this protective regulation.

“The administration, for example, contends that a rule change is necessary to protect access to contraception, but absolutely no evidence is presented to justify any such concern. In the process, the administration blatantly ignores the scientific evidence that certain controversial prescriptions that abortion advocates promote as contraception are actually potential abortifacients, ending the life of a living, developing human embryo. This is a critical concern for pro-life patients, healthcare professionals and institutions.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicated in 2008 in its final rule, “We have found no evidence that these regulations will create new barriers in accessing contraception unless those contraceptives are currently delivered over the religious or moral objections of the provider in such programs or research activities.”

Dr. Ries added, “The Obama administration’s regulatory action today diminishes the civil rights that protect conscientious physicians and other healthcare professionals against discrimination. Any weakening of protections against discrimination against life-affirming healthcare professionals ultimately threatens to severely worsen patient access to health care.

“Losing conscientious healthcare professionals and faith-based institutions to discrimination and job loss especially imperils the poor and patients in medically underserved areas. We are already facing critical shortages of primary care physicians, and the Obama administration’s decision now threatens to make the situation far worse for patients across the country who depend on faith-based health care.”

National survey results show that over nine of ten faith-based physicians, who are among the most likely to be serving the poor and those in medically underserved areas, indicate they would rather leave the profession if denied the ability to practice medicine according to conscientiously held ethical standards. Survey results also indicate that 20% of faith-based medical students say they are “not pursuing a career in Obstetrics or Gynecology” because of perceived discrimination and coercion in that field.

Dr. Ries added, “Stories told to me by medical students across the country indicate that the threat of being forced to participate in abortion procedures and violate their moral integrity is enough to steer them in the opposite direction. That means even fewer physicians for women in the future in this specialty that is already facing critical shortages.

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Joxel Garcia noted, “Especially in physician shortage states such as Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Delaware, losing just one physician can erase healthcare access for thousands of patients.

“Pushing conscientious physicians out of medicine is a significant step toward a healthcare system controlled by the state that moves away from the ethical roots of medicine. In the new governmental utilitarian model, the ‘common good’ defined by the state supersedes any moral, religious or ethical principle such as embodied in the Hippocratic Oath, which has protected patients for millennia.”

As the second-in-command under Sec. Mike Leavitt at the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dr. Garcia oversaw the development and implementation of the conscience regulation and continues to work closely with the CMA and others to protect conscience rights. He currently serves as President and Dean at the Ponce School of Medicine & Health Sciences, where CMA provides a medical student ministry, as it does on over 90 percent of the nation’s medical and dental school campuses.

Dr. Ries’ clinical career has included faculty appointments at Indiana University School of Medicine and Butler University; he has also served as medical consultant to NBC, CBS, FOX and ABC network affiliates.

A matter of conscience

Washington Times
17 December, 2008

Reproduced with permission

Jonathan Imbody*

Americans blanch at abortion coercion in China, where population control agents force mothers to end the lives of their unborn babies who exceed the mandated limit of one child per couple. Yet few Americans realize that abortion-related mandates are also threatening to U.S. health care professionals who follow medical standards such as the Hippocratic Oath.

Conscientious physicians and other health care professionals are being pressured, under threat of job loss, to violate medical ethics standards by performing abortions and referring patients to abortion clinics to do the deed.

Abortion advocates have been lobbying vociferously to cast abortion as standard medical care and to mandate abortion participation by all health care professionals. Only a tiny fraction of U.S. physicians otherwise are willing to violate the Hippocratic Oath, which has guided medicine for well over two millennia, by participating in abortions.

The abortion mandate strategy may be ill-conceived, but unfortunately it is not ill-fated.

Abortion, which neither heals nor comforts, does not qualify as standard medical care under historical medical standards; it has only recently and politically infiltrated health care. Since American health care professionals have long enjoyed a measure of autonomy in making professional decisions, mandating participation in a procedure prohibited by long-standing medical ethics standards seems likewise implausible.

But abortion ideology and zeal have a way of trumping all notions of ethics and professionalism.

Aggressive abortion mandate advocates dominate the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a highly politicized medical specialty group with vast influence over the profession of obstetrics and gynecology. Last November, ACOG issued an official ethics statement tellingly entitled, “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine.” The ACOG statement ignores the role of objective standards in conscientious objections to abortion. ACOG instead denigrates conscience as a mere subjective “sentiment.” In reality, however, health care professionals who object to abortion do so not because of subjective feelings but because killing the unborn contravenes Hippocratic, biblical and other life-affirming objective ethical standards.

By contrast, abortion ideology rests on the subjective, unanchored notion of “privacy” and “patient autonomy.” By ripping conscience from its foundation of objective standards and demoting it to the level of subjective feelings, ACOG paints abortion objections as a clash between a physician’s feelings and a patient’s autonomy. With autonomy elevated as the ethical trump card, physicians and all ethical standards must bow in submission.

Having demoted conscience to the subjective realm and elevated patient autonomy to a position of unchallengeable supremacy, ACOG opposes faith-based ethical standards as “an imposition of religious or moral beliefs on patients.”ACOG even incredibly contends that pro-life obstetricians should not only be required to perform or refer for abortions; they should also relocate their practices close to abortionists to make such referrals more convenient.

Given the official link between ACOG ethics positions and physician board certification, obstetricians who refuse to follow ACOG’s abortion mandate now presumably stand to lose their hospital privileges and their livelihood. Medical ethics thus would be turned upside down, as life-honoring physicians lose the ability to practice medicine simply for following the Hippocratic Oath.

Meanwhile, the abortion mandate movement will soon tap potentially irrepressible numbers in Congress and powerful advocates in the White House and the administration.

President-elect Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton and other abortion advocates have strenuously opposed a modest U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation that would ensure freedom of conscience in health care. The regulation would finally implement over 35 years of federal civil rights law aimed at protecting health care professionals from abortion-related coercion.

The HHS regulation, expected to be finalized before Dec. 20, could be overturned by a pro-abortion Congress and president, either through new legislation or a new regulation.

Mandating abortion participation in health care is rife with irony. Most Americans easily recognize the hypocrisy of forcing “pro-choice” ideology on all health care professionals. The injustice of ending the lives of innocent unborn children has only persisted in this country, where most citizens oppose abortion on demand, under the smokescreen of choice.

By driving out pro-life obstetricians and gynecologists who refuse to participate in abortions, abortion mandates would ironically decrease women’s access to some of the most conscientious and compassionate physicians in America, many of whom volunteer free medical services to poor women. Abortion mandates threaten to shut down thousands of life-affirming, faith-based hospitals and clinics that provide care in some of the nation’s most underserved communities.

Maybe that’s what it will take for Americans to penetrate the fog of abortion propaganda and recognize that breaching the foundational right to life imperils all other rights.

Don’t doctors deserve a choice on abortion?

Letter to the Editor
Baltimore Sun

13 November, 2008

Reproduced with permission

Jonathan Imbody*

The acerbic editorial “Bush rules” (Nov. 11) ironically accuses the Bush administration of attacking “personal rights” and then lambastes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for proposing a regulation to protect the civil rights of health care professionals.

The Baltimore Sun protests “extending the right to refuse to participate in an abortion to include an array of health care workers.” Which medical professionals does the paper deem unworthy of civil rights so that they should be forced to violate their conscience and the Hippocratic Oath?

Thankfully, shortly after the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade wrested decision-making control from the states and the people, a prescient Congress began passing laws to prevent coercion and discrimination against health care professionals on both sides of the abortion debate. Yet three major civil rights laws have never been implemented. Meanwhile, “pro choice” advocates, provoked by the fact that the vast majority of physicians refuse to perform abortions, have resorted to seeking to require participation in abortion.

A recent official statement of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists not only requires that physicians perform or refer for abortions but also demands that pro-life physicians relocate in order to refer patients to nearby abortion clinics. Our members report losing jobs and promotions over their commitment to life-affirming standards. The proposed HHS regulation is urgently needed to protect compassionate and conscientious physicians who are simply extending the life-affirming ethic and patient protections of the Hippocratic Oath.