The precarious balance between rights and freedoms

The right to exercise moral, ethical or conscientious objection in the medical field is eroding as the definition and scope of “rights” is expanding.

A Bush administration proposal aimed at protecting health-care workers who object to abortion, and to birth-control methods they consider tantamount to abortion, has escalated a bitter debate over the balance between religious freedom and patients’ rights.

What makes this debate bitter is usually the anger which which abortion proponents argue, and the language they use. So it’s no surprise that…

the draft proposal has sparked intense criticism by family planning advocates, women’s health activists, and members of Congress who say the regulation would create overwhelming obstacles for women seeking abortions and birth control.

‘Family planning advocates’ and ‘women’s health activists’ are about the business of abortion, not family advocacy and women’s health and well-being. And what “overwhelming obstacles” would it create to allow individual doctors or health professionals to remove themselves from the list of others who provide abortion and controversial drugs? It’s a bogus claim.

There is also deep concern that the rule could have far-reaching, but less obvious, implications. Because of its wide scope and because it would — apparently for the first time — define abortion in a federal regulation as anything that affects a fertilized egg, the regulation could raise questions about a broad spectrum of scientific research and care, critics say.

For purposes of clarity, those critics should define ‘scientific research’, and for that matter, their subjective views of the “fertilized egg” that is aborted as anything other than human life that is ended.

This article is alarmist. And virtually all one-sided, until the end. At least WaPo added a few thoughts from the regulation’s supporters.

“This would essentially simply require people to comply with laws that they have been required to comply with for decades,” said M. Casey Mattox of the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom. “That does not mean any organization or state can’t keep doing exactly what it’s been doing. It means they have to make room for people who have sincere moral or ethical concerns about doing something.”

And:

Richard S. Myers, a law professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., said: “Religious freedom is an important part of the history of this country. People who have a religious or moral belief should not be forced to participate in an act they find abhorrent.”