Administration's "Iron fist" crushes conscience clause but the issue is not going away

On the same day the House of Representatives voted to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama Administration demonstrated once again that it is committed to crushing all opposition to the agenda of that organization and others like it who hide their evil agenda under the increasingly thin mask of "freedom of choice."

The Obama administration on Friday peeled back a rule defining when health-care workers can refuse to administer treatments they find morally objectionable, reversing a final act of George W. Bush's administration.

The Bush measure said that a wide variety of health-care workers could object to participating in abortions if they had moral objections to the procedure. Hospitals and clinics faced a loss of federal funds if they failed to uphold what the Bush administration termed workers' "right of conscience."

Liberal groups opposed the rule, saying it could open the door to a broader denial of services. They said it could allow insurance companies to deny claims for birth-control pills or enable hospitals to refuse emergency contraception to victims of rape.

While there was little evidence that such denials were happening with any frequency, the Obama administration said it needed to act to prevent ambiguity. It said decades of law already protect workers from participating in abortions if they don't wish to.

The Department of Health and Human Services said it wanted to make clear that existing conscience protections don't mean health-care providers can refuse to treat entire groups of people based on religious or moral beliefs. The agency said it was concerned the Bush rule could restrict access to contraception or other medical services.

"The administration strongly supports provider conscience laws that protect and support the rights of health care providers, and also recognizes and supports the rights of patients," the department said in a statement. "Strong conscience laws make it clear that health care providers cannot be compelled to perform or assist in an abortion."

The Obama administration's guidance, released Friday, nullified most of the Bush regulation, while leaving in place a piece that designates a federal office to receive complaints about violations of the earlier statutes.

Antiabortion [sic] advocates said the change could open the door for pressure on nurses, medical students and other health workers to provide abortion services. "Pro-life health-care providers need the strongest protections they can get," said David O'Steen, executive director for National Right to Life. Abortion-rights supporters hailed the change, saying it will prevent improper denials of service.

The administration said that rescinding the certification requirements under the Bush rule would result in a cost savings of $43.6 million each year to the health-care industry.

Wesley J. Smith notes that the general issue of conscience in healthcare is much larger than abortion in particular.

This Administration talks about building bridges across moral chasms and crossing difficult cultural divides. It talks the talk, but with this act, it walks in the exact opposite direction–again.

The administration says, that despite peeling back the rule it still respected the rights of conscience. I’ll have to see what the rule actually states, which may take a few days, before I’ll believe that. But conscience is about more than abortion. And this administration has shown a propensity to come down with an iron fist.

The conscience clause issue isn’t going away. In fact, I predict it will be one of the big fights in bioethics over the next decade as medicine increasingly becomes involved in actively taking human life as well as–or in conjunction with–saving human lives.