Bush Pushes Through Rule Allowing Medical Providers To Decline Care Based On Moral Objections
Which would essentially allow things like pharmacists not filling prescriptions for birth control and doctors not performing abortions.
Reporting from Washington—The Bush administration announced its “conscience protection” rule for the healthcare industry Thursday, giving doctors, hospitals, and even receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.
“This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience,” said outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.
The right-to-refuse rule includes abortion and other aspects of healthcare where moral concerns could arise, Leavitt’s office said, such as birth control, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research and assisted suicide.
The rule, to be published today in the Federal Register, takes effect the day before President Bush leaves office.
The left gets up in arms about this, but what is it if not empowering members of the health care industry with the freedom of choice?
Liberals go on and on about women having the right to choose to kill their unborn children, and while I think that’s a specious sort of argument (since when is it ok to choose to kill your baby, and why is a baby in the womb any different logically from a baby outside the womb?) it takes a special sort of hypocrite to say that a patient can choose but a health care provider cannot.
And then there are the questions of religious freedom. After over a century of Catholics providing health care in this country (the history of Catholic hospitals is a rich one), are we going to start say that Catholics can’t be doctors and follow their religious doctrine?
If we force doctors to provide care they don’t want to provide, how can we continue to call ourselves a free country?
