Federal laws and the U.S. Constitution protect the conscience and religious rights of those in the medical field, but Rachel Morrison of the Ethics and Public Policy Center says the White House does not see it that way.
According to LifeNews.com, the potential new pro-abortion mandate could shut down Christian healthcare throughout the U.S. Catholic News Service reports conservative leaders discovered the plans for the radical new regulation buried in a legal memorandum from the pro-abortion Leadership Conference and a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announcement.
"I think there's a lot of problematic policies coming out of the Biden administration and HHS specifically that want to promote abortion and promote gender-transition treatments, including for minors, and to disregard the conscience and religious freedom rights of healthcare professionals to opt out of performing those procedures," Morrison says.
For example, hospitals could lose federal funds if they do not force their staff to comply, and that includes Christian and Catholic hospitals. Morrison warns that would lead to a "devastating impact" in the medical community.
"Healthcare professionals and religious organizations would be forced with choices of potentially having to violate their conscience or religious beliefs or exiting the profession altogether," she explains.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) continues to speak out against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposal that would undo a Trump administration rule that protected doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers to provide care in a manner consistent with their religious and ethics beliefs.
"There are dozens of federal laws protecting the conscience of pro-life medical professionals, but the Biden administration has decided it's not worth enforcing any of those laws," says ADF senior counsel Matt Bowman. "In fact, it's going to violate those laws itself by giving out taxpayer dollars to entities that force doctors or nurses to be involved in abortion."
When the federal government has a stewardship of taxpayer dollars, Bowman says it needs to make sure that federal laws are followed, including laws that say hospitals should not be forcing doctors and nurses to participate in things such as abortion.
"What the Biden administration is doing is saying, 'We're going to issue a regulation basically ignoring those laws, we're going to let hospitals force people to assist abortions, we're going to let states force churches and nuns to have abortion in their health insurance, and we're going to pull down the rules that would require enforcement of these laws,'" Bowman explains.
Crafted to be an anti-sex discrimination provision under the Affordable Care Act, the rule process will be lengthy, unless an emergency is declared to speed it along. It would also draw lawsuits to halt it, just as it did during the Obama administration.
