Obama’s Attack on Medical Civil Liberties
While the media remain fixated on a slumping economy that gets sicker with each punishing presidential prescription, a different set of defining and similarly freedom-diminishing policy directives emerging from the White House goes dissimilarly unnoticed.
Earlier this month, the President took the first step in rescinding a Bush administration moral conscience regulation which enforces existing legal protections against discrimination and intimidation for doctors and other healthcare professionals who invoke conscience by refusing to participate in medical procedures they believe immoral.
The rule, which was finalized last year placed no restriction upon any legal medical procedure; it simply brought the executive branch into compliance with several existing laws including:
# the 1973 “Church Amendments” which protect doctors and other healthcare professionals from discrimination due to religious belief or moral conviction;
# the 1996 “Public Health Service Act Amendment” which prohibits government from discriminating against individual and institutional healthcare providers who choose not to provide abortion services or receive abortion training; and
# the 2004 “Hyde-Weldon Amendment” which prohibits certain federal funds going to federal and state agencies and programs that discriminate against healthcare providers who decline to offer or refer abortion services.
Simply put, these three venerable laws passed by Congress and signed by former Presidents protect doctors and nurses from being professionally threatened because they allow their conscience to dictate their professional actions.
By eliminating the enforcement of these legal protections, the Obama Administration is signaling that it intends to ignore the law and refuse to protect the civil liberties of healthcare professionals based upon religious or moral conscience. Without enforcement, healthcare personnel will have scant legal recourse for intimidation and bigotry rendering the laws intended to protect them meaningless.
