Are Democrats Really Against Following Your Conscience?
Last December, the Bush administration granted protection to health care workers who refused to perform certain procedures on moral grounds. If a hospital, health plan or clinic didn’t accommodate the consciences of their employees, they’d lose federal funding. Abortion rights activists proceeded to take the low road.
But women’s health advocates, family planning proponents, abortion rights activists and some members of Congress condemned the regulation, saying it will be a major obstacle to providing many health services, including abortion, family planning, infertility treatment, and end-of-life care, as well as possibly a wide range of scientific research.
Never mind moral issues, and never mind that plenty of people who have no problem with performing these procedures exist, there must not even be the slightest impediment to these procedures. Guess we know where their priorities lie.
As well as the priorities of some Democrats in Congress.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill last month to repeal the rule, said: "We will not allow this rule to stand. It threatens the health and well-being of women and the rights of patients across the country." Similar legislation is pending in the House.
No, it does not threaten anyone’s health or well-being. Allowing an employee to follow their conscience simply means finding someone who’s ethics aren’t similarly bothered.
In spite of these overwrought pronouncements, the rule was put in place.
That was then, this is now.
Taking another step into the abortion debate, the Obama administration Friday will move to rescind a controversial rule that allows health-care workers to deny abortion counseling or other family-planning services if doing so would violate their moral beliefs, according to administration officials.
The rollback of the "conscience rule" comes just two months after the Bush administration announced it last year in one of its final policy initiatives.
This rule is important, mostly to protect health care workers from losing their jobs over their personal beliefs. They weren’t supposed to be able to lose it, but that didn’t stop the health care industry.
For more than 30 years, federal law has allowed doctors and nurses to decline to provide abortion services as a matter of conscience, a protection that is not subject to rulemaking.
In promulgating the new rule last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said it was necessary to address discrimination in the medical field.
He criticized "an environment in the health-care field that is intolerant of individual conscience, certain religious beliefs, ethnic and cultural traditions and moral convictions."
Doctors have been successfully sued for not performing procedures they objected to, so the rule is necessary to give this same protection to other, non-abortion-related procedures.
The Obama administration claims:
Officials said the administration will consider drafting a new rule to clarify what health-care workers can reasonably refuse for patients.
How about we find out what the administration considers "reasonable" before doing away with this valuable protection? Or is conscience not that big a deal to Barack Obama? It doesn’t sound like it.
Filed under: Doug • Ethics & Morality • Medicine
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Not knowing all the details, I would tend to agree that health care workers OUGHT to be able to follow their conscience. Just like soldiers who are opposed to a given war for religious or ethical reasons ought to be able to opt out. Freedom of conscience ought to apply to both equally, it seems to me.
FYI, as it stands now, I believe, soldiers who come to believe in pacifism in all cases can get CO status and be removed from the army. However, soldiers who aren’t pacifists, but who merely believe one specific military action is wrong, CAN’T get CO status. That is, if a soldier was opposed to the Iraq War, thinking it unjust, he or she is just out of luck. They HAVE to participate. I’m in favor of freedom of conscience. How about you in that circumstance?
There’s far too much possibility for shenanigans regarding CO status on a war-by-war basis. E.g. join the Army for the benefits but plead CO each time the shooting starts, or only based on political reasons. I don’t see how you could implement that without it getting out of hand easily and quickly.
If you have qualms about what kinds of wars you might or might not support, by all means don’t enlist. (Which is a one reason why I’m against the draft.)
And that’s why I think this is a bit of an apples vs. oranges comparison. When you enlist, you’re signing an agreement with the military. When you become a doctor, there’s no agreement forcing you to do everything a patient tells you to.
One reason I posted this was because of something you said in this thread. If I said that Republicans are for freedom of conscience for health care workers and Democrats aren’t, you’d have called me out on it. And yet here we are; Democrats and liberal activist groups coming out against and beginning to overturn a rule that protects that very thing, and suing people who try to exercise that right. You and every one of your friends may be against this, but that doesn’t really matter when those in power, that you keep voting for, are pushing for it, lip service notwithstanding.
Hmmm. I say, let conscience decide in both cases.
Shenanigans? You mean you think some soldiers would just quit for the fun of it when it came to some wars, but not other wars? I respect our military sons and daughters enough to think they are adult enough and responsible enough to decide themselves.
If it is the case that Dems are coming out opposed to freedom of choice, I’d oppose them on that point.
I suppose the point they make would be similar to the one you make regarding the military: IF you think that there are SOME medical procedures you don’t want to take part in/that go against your personal philosophy, then don’t enter the medical field.
I would disagree with them on that issue and you on the military issue. Let adult citizens decide for themselves, within reason.