As I have often said, the culture of death brooks no dissent. The Bush “conscience clause” regulations protecting health care workers from being discriminated against in their employment for refusing to participate in medical procedures with which they disagree on religious or moral grounds, has been attacked in court by six states. From the story:
In filing the lawsuit, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is seeking an injunction to stop the Provider Conscience Rule from taking effect. The lawsuit also asks the court to invalidate the regulation.This is just the opening of a drive that will seek to make all health care workers potentially complicit in abortion, assisted suicide, and other such activities in the medical context, that seeks to drive doctors, nurses, and others who believe in the literal interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath out of medicine altogether.
Blumenthal said the rule would allow health care providers or pharmacists to deny a patient medical care without explanation or offering the patient a referral or information on alternatives, upsetting the balance between health providers’ religious freedom and patients’ rights.
It would also override a 2007 Connecticut law that guarantees that all hospitals in the state provide emergency contraception, commonly known as Plan B, to rape victims. That law has been endorsed by Catholic leaders, who initially opposed it, and has not produced complaints, Blumenthal said.
And all too typically, the the story doesn’t even bother to present the perspectives of advocates for the other side—surely somebody could have been found to defend the regulations. But it was able to get this surreal quote from the ACLU representative:
Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, drew a distinction between religious rights and the Provider Conscience Rule. “We have long protected religious liberty rights, but not when it curtails basic rights to reproductive freedom,” he said.Fascinating. Religious freedom is explicitly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, but reproductive liberty is a “penumbra” that the courts have found to be implied therein. Which should have the first protection under the law and the support of a group claiming to stand up dispassionately for individual civil liberties?
