{"id":8003,"date":"2018-01-18T09:54:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T17:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.consciencelaws.org\/?p=8003"},"modified":"2018-03-03T18:57:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T02:57:53","slug":"no-politico-conscience-protections-are-neither-so-called-nor-controversial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.consciencelaws.org\/?p=8003","title":{"rendered":"No, Politico, Conscience Protections Are Neither ‘So-Called’ Nor ‘Controversial’"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is simply no historical ground upon which Politico can claim that protecting the right of medical professionals not to participate in abortion has been \u2018controversial\u2019 since Roe v. Wade.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Federalist<\/strong><\/em><\/a>
\nReproduced with permission<\/em><\/p>\n

Casey Mattox<\/p>\n

Government shouldn\u2019t force people to violate their consciences. Until recently, that opinion hasn\u2019t been particularly controversial, even where actual controversial issues like abortion were involved. One can support abortion and still think government shouldn\u2019t discriminate against medical professionals who don\u2019t perform abortions.<\/p>\n

But if you want to gin up opposition to something, it presumably helps to pretend that it\u2019s your opponent who is the extremist. You can\u2019t very well admit that it\u2019s your own opinion that is historically extreme and your opponent who has history on his side. That\u2019s a much harder sell.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is why, in a story yesterday about the new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services office to address conscience and religious freedom for medical professionals and institutions,\u00a0Politico<\/em> casually dropped this nugget<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cSo-called conscience protections have been politically controversial since shortly after\u00a0Roe v. Wade <\/em>legalized abortion in 1973.\u201d<\/p>\n

This claim may be politically useful, but it is demonstrably false. At the risk of appearing to repeatedly bludgeon this false narrative to death, it\u2019s important to understand just how inexcusably wrong this instance of fake news is, and how these sorts of so-called \u201cmistakes\u201d drive narratives that create today\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n

\u2018Shortly after\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Weeks after the Supreme Court released its decision in\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>, Congress enacted the first of the federal laws aimed at protecting conscience in light of this newly minted \u201cright\u201d to abortion. The Church Amendment, named for its sponsor, Idaho\u2019s longtime Democratic Senator Frank Church, ensured that Catholic hospitals could continue to provide health care to millions of Medicaid patients without being forced to also perform abortions.<\/p>\n

That provision passed 372-1 in the House and 92-1 in the Senate. Noted right-winger Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke in favor of the law on the floor of the Senate, calling it necessary \u201cto give full protection to the religious freedom of physicians and others.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Democrat-controlled Congress added additional \u201cso-called conscience protections\u201d to the Church Amendment for these individual medical professionals and in federally funded programs over the next few years. The idea that these laws were controversial would have been a surprise to the bipartisan coalitions in Congress voting for them.<\/p>\n

In 1992, Nadine\u00a0Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, testified in favor of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (yep, you read that correctly), saying RFRA would protect \u201csuch familiar practices as . . . permitting religiously sponsored hospitals to decline to provide abortion or contraception services.\u201d The ACLU didn\u2019t think conscience was either \u201cso-called\u201d or \u201ccontroversial\u201d in 1992.<\/p>\n

In\u00a01996, a bipartisan Congress again defended conscience rights, enacting the Coats-Snowe Amendment to the Public Health Services Act with President Bill Clinton\u2019s signature. This law prohibits the federal government and any state or local government receiving federal funds (i.e., all of them) from discriminating against physicians or health-training programs or their participants on the basis that they don\u2019t provide or undergo abortion training or perform or refer for abortions.<\/p>\n

Forty-seven states have enacted laws protecting medical professionals from being discriminated against because of their objection to participating in abortion, most of those becoming law in the years immediately following\u00a0Roe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But everything above is just icing on the cake. Politico<\/em> could have confirmed its narrative was false just by reading\u00a0Roe.\u00a0<\/em>Addressing the concern that this new right to an abortion might result in attempts to force medical professionals to perform them, the Supreme Court explained this wouldn\u2019t happen because the American Medical Association\u2019s House of Delegates had already broadly defended the exercise of religious and moral conscience in the abortion context,\u00a0quoting it in\u00a0Roe<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Be it \u2026 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\u00a0violative\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the companion case\u00a0Doe v. Bolton<\/em><\/a>, the Supreme Court called a state law allowing hospitals not to admit patients for abortions and prohibiting them from requiring medical professionals to assist in them an\u00a0\u201cappropriate protection to the individual and to the denominational hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is simply no historical ground upon which Politico<\/em> can claim that protecting the right of medical professionals not to participate in abortion was \u201ccontroversial\u201d at the time of\u00a0Roe\u00a0<\/em>or in the decades thereafter. It has only become \u201ccontroversial\u201d to defend the right of people to think differently and to live according to their own moral compass when the political left recently abandoned this classically liberal principle in favor of government compulsion.<\/p>\n

The whole article reads like a horror movie in search of a villain. Its writers and interviewees know that HHS committing resources to safeguard the conscience of medical professionals and institutions that deliver health services to Americans is an evil plot. They just don\u2019t know how. So the authors introduce the reader to none of these laws (available on the HHS Office of Civil Rights website<\/a>\u00a0with handy links), vaguely assert that all of this is really about LGBT issues (it\u2019s not), and try to make boogey-men of those in this new office.<\/p>\n

What Politico<\/em> doesn\u2019t do is inform readers that those advocating for government to compel medical professionals to perform abortions are actually the ones advocating for a departure from our historical common ground of respecting one another\u2019s conscience. That, apparently, would complicate the narrative.<\/p>\n

Casey Mattox is senior counsel with\u00a0Alliance Defending Freedom<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter at @CaseyMattox_.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is simply no historical ground upon which Politico can claim that protecting the right of medical professionals not to participate in abortion has been \u2018controversial\u2019 since Roe v. Wade. The Federalist Reproduced with permission Casey Mattox Government shouldn\u2019t force people to violate their consciences. Until recently, that opinion hasn\u2019t been particularly controversial, even where … Continue reading “No, Politico, Conscience Protections Are Neither ‘So-Called’ Nor ‘Controversial’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5432,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,295,511,28],"tags":[57,62,2332],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-8003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-news","category-religious-freedom","category-society-politics","category-usa","tag-alliance-defending-freedom","tag-american-civil-liberties-union-aclu","tag-us-dept-of-health-and-human-services-hhs"],"yoast_head":"\r\nNo, Politico, Conscience Protections Are Neither 'So-Called' Nor 'Controversial' - Protection of Conscience Project News<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.consciencelaws.org\/?p=8003\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"No, Politico, Conscience Protections Are Neither 'So-Called' Nor 'Controversial' - Protection of Conscience Project News\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There is simply no historical ground upon which Politico can claim that protecting the right of medical professionals not to participate in abortion has been \u2018controversial\u2019 since Roe v. 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