The Religious Right's campaign to expand "religious refusals" has recently intensified. The Medical Right -- the fringe medical groups that share the Religious Right's anti-choice agenda -- wants more expansive protections for physicians who object to providing reproductive health care services for moral or religious reasons. And they don't just want to be able to refuse to provide abortion care or referral.
Recently-leaked Department of Health and Human Services draft regulations would redefine contraception as abortion and, in so doing, extend protections to health care providers who would refuse women contraceptive access as well as abortion care. As a minister who believes social justice must include reproductive justice, I am alarmed that religion is being used as an excuse to deny women abortion services. In effect, women are being told that their conscience doesn't count -- or doesn't count as much as a physician's.
The Medical Right's campaign involves putting pressure on both the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Bush Administration to give physicians more leeway in refusing to refer for abortion services. But physicians already have ample protection to opt out of providing services if they have moral or religious objections. Conscience protections -- also called conscience clauses and religious refusals -- have been in place since 1973, when the Church Amendment (named for Senator Frank Church) was enacted. Congress and the President strengthened that several years ago with the Weldon Amendment.
We live in a religiously pluralistic society, and as a nation we believe in protecting religious expression and freedom. With regard to abortion and contraception, I believe this means we must accommodate both the physician who objects to providing abortion services and the patient who wants and need this service. A physician's objection to abortion must never result in a woman being denied a service she wants, needs and is legally and morally entitled to.
The Medical Right is pressuring ACOG -- which represents 90% of the nation's ob/gyns -- to allow anti-abortion physicians to refuse to provide women with referrals to other doctors who will perform the procedure. The leaked HHS draft regulations reveal that the department is also under pressure to broaden its regulations on opting out of services. Taken together, these proposed restrictions would make it more difficult for women to obtain abortion services and contraception.
In this clash of a healthcare provider's conscience with a woman's conscience, women will lose. An ACOG ethics opinion states the conflict well:
Although respect for conscience is important, conscientious refusals should be limited if they constitute an imposition of religious or moral beliefs on patients, negatively affect a patient's health, are based on scientific misinformation, or create or reinforce racial or socioeconomic inequalities.
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice supports this position as an appropriate reflection of American religious and social values. Health care professionals must provide information and care consistent with the highest standards of scientific evidence and responsive to the needs and wishes of individual patients -- without ideological or theological restrictions.
Women's health advocates, religious leaders, and people of faith need to stand together to protect a woman's right to services and allow her to follow her own conscience.
