If conscience protection goes….
….the state will take its place. Shudder the thought.
Cardinal Francis George, president of the USCCB, has issued a new letter urging citizens to make their voices heard by the government that says its listening, on the threat to remove the traditional physicians conscience clause from the practice of health care.
George warns that this country will go straight from democracy to despotism if that happens.
“No government should come between an individual person and God — that’s what America is supposed to be about,” said the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a videotaped message available on the USCCB Web site [here] and on YouTube [here].
“This is the true common ground for us as Americans,” he added. “We therefore need legal protections for freedom of conscience and of religion — including freedom for religious health care institutions to be true to themselves.”
You have until April 9 to comment on the plans by HHS to remove the long-standing rule that
codifies several existing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination against health professionals who decline to participate in abortions or other medical procedures because of their religious or other moral objections.
President Bush put that protection in place in his final days.
The cardinal said the issue centers on “two principles or ideas that have been basic to life in our country: religious liberty and the freedom of personal conscience.”
He noted that conscientious objection has been allowed for those opposed to participating in a war, “even though it’s good to defend your country,” and for doctors who do not want to be involved in administering the death penalty.
“Why shouldn’t our government and our legal system permit conscientious objection to a morally bad action, the killing of babies in their mother’s womb?” Cardinal George asked. “People understand what really happens in an abortion and in related procedures — a living member of the human family is killed — … and no one should be forced by the government to act as though he or she were blind to this reality.”
He urged Catholics to tell the Department of Health and Human Services “that you stand for the protection of conscience, especially now for those who provide the health care services so necessary for a good society.”
This is so clear a violation of democratic principles and the free exercise of our rights, as Cardinal George points out. This administration has already, in Obama’s first few days in office, extended federal funding to abortion outside this country by reversing the Mexico City Policy, and last week by executive order, expanded embryonic stem cell research. If this move to strip health care of conscience protections goes through, medicine in America will drastically change.
No doubt Cardinal George made that point, diplomatically, in his brief meeting today with Obama in the White House.
0 Comment
Freedom of conscience is indeed important. But the current rule as enacted by Bush the day before Obama took office, actually allows for any employee at a hospital or health care provider to abandon any task at any time for any reason. If this freedom of choice rule were so landmark, fundamental and important, why was it written in the penultimate days of the Bush administration? With all the problems on the administration’s plate in August-December, ’08, one must wonder whether the rule was crafted with wisdon or with expediency, was it judicious or provocative, and was it written to protect or ensnare? Since the Church amendment of 1973, the conscience clause in health care has been strengthened many times, and it will continue to protect and defend our right of conscience. But sometimes rules written in haste are indeed badly written. If this protection were so important and fundamental, we must wonder why it was the last thing on President Bush’s mind.