Matt Bowman: Compelled killing of the preborn
________ Over at the law professor blog “Mirror of Justice,” there is a good conversation going on about President Obama’s repeal of conscience protections for health care providers. The professors raise the issue of how widely conscience should be protected on issues other than abortion. One professor comments that “we’re not talking about the need for self-restraint by the government . . . we’re talking about bringing government power to bear against non-state entities.” This latter point may be true generally, but it is only partially true when we are talking about Obama’s rescission of conscience protections. The federal conscience laws that Obama is refusing to enforce do not impose accommodation on all private entities, but only on federal funding recipients. Those recipients include private, state and public entities. So the issue is whether federal taxpayers should subsidize pro-abortion conscience violators, and whether states can impose conscience violations on the entire health provider spectrum. Obama’s rescinding of conscience protections raises various possibilities, including whether states can force doctors to participate in abortions as a condition of keeping a medical license, and whether medical students and residents in state schools might be forced to train on abortions in order to graduate from their programs. I agree with the professors that killing the innocent is not just one among many vexing conscience issues like whether cab drivers can refuse to drive people to liquor stores. If respect for conscience means anything it should mean that people can’t be forced to worship, and they can’t be forced to kill the innocent. In very recent history, medicine and law both agreed that there was a duty not to kill preborn human beings. Today’s irony is that the government created this crisis by abandoning its most sacred duty to protect human lives. When the Supreme Court made murder legal, it imposed this unprecedented conscience threat on the medical community. The right not to participate in abortion isn’t just one competing interest among many asking for special treatment. It is a plea from a uniquely important profession, historically tasked with preserving life, so that its own ethical demands will not be reversed 180 degrees to transform its profession into one that must mechanistically dispense death. A government that imposes abortion on society has a greater duty to protect conscience, not a lesser one. The minimum that our government can do is to protect people from being compelled to participate in the murderous society it has unleashed. This applies even in private contexts. The need for conscience protection was recognized shortly after Roe even by “pro-choicers,” which is why we have the conscience-protecting laws that President Obama wants to deep-freeze. Supreme Court precedent does not yet require abortion participation just because it calls abortion a “constitutional right” (at least, not until FOCA is signed, or until we get more Justice Ginsburgs). Roe’s companion case Doe v. Bolton relied on the fact that Georgia’s law protected the right of hospitals and doctors “to refrain, for moral or religious reasons, from participating in the abortion procedure.” But today the abortion movement is lobbying governments to compel the killing of preborn children rather than to prevent it or even to allow it, and those states pursue their compulsion while accepting federal funds. Pro-abortion legal theory has no limit on its willingness to force abortion participation in order to guarantee “access.” (For that matter, pro-abortion views also lead to a woman’s “duty to abort.” This duty will start with disabled babies and multiple pregnancies, and will progress to teenage pregnancy “vaccinations” and beyond) A participant at MOJ asks what kind of “forcing” is illegitimate, and what kind might be acceptable. Here again, the historical context is necessary. In this age of anti-employee-discrimination laws, why should private entities be able to fire employees who won’t participate in abortion, when the government has considered it murder until barely yesterday, and the Hippocratic Oath has condemned it for millennia? Perhaps we can start by agreeing that imposing a professional licensing duty on Ob/Gyns to participate in abortions is illegitimate, as are state laws requiring participation in various kinds of preborn killing. Then the ante should go up when the issue involves federal funding. If a university or hospital refuses to accommodate employees who want to care for patients without participating in abortions, it should not be eligible for federal funding. Most if not all of the situations protected by federal conscience laws are not on the margins of conscience theory–they strike at the heart of conscience protection, and removing those conscience protections threatens to exterminate pro-life people from the health profession. President Obama proposes to rescind the conscience-protection regulations altogether, including as they would apply to any kind of abortion. The vast majority of patients want to trust their doctors, and to have the freedom to choose a doctor who shares their basic values. But the abortion movement and the current federal administration wants to deny patients the right to access any pro-life doctor, pharmacist, or nurse. (People who still wish to submit a comment to HHS asking that doctors not be forced to participate in abortions can do so at www.freedom2care.org. But the deadline is April 9.) |
