Many doctors are motivated by their moral and religious beliefs to provide abortions. Why doesn’t HHS care about their consciences?
Blog post by Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project
Over the past few years, the news has been filled with stories of religious hospitals that ban abortions even during medical emergencies, pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception, and even a certain large arts and crafts chain store that objects to providing contraceptive insurance coverage for its employees. Conservative groups have advocated for increasingly broad laws and policies that allow such objectors to refuse to provide a wide range of medical care, regardless of their patients own beliefs or medical needs. Most recently, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the creation of a new rule that would give medical providers, insurance companies, and employers a broad right to deny abortion, sterilization, contraception, LGBTQ+ health care, and other services that conflict with their religious or moral beliefs.
With such a pervasive focus on religious health care refusals, it’s easy to forget that many healthcare professionals’ religious and moral beliefs point in the opposite direction — supporting the right to individual bodily autonomy and access to medically appropriate and comprehensive health care. Unfortunately for such providers, the proposed HHS conscience rule entirely fails to protect them. Under the rule, while no health care employer can require its employees to participate in abortion, sterilization, or certain other services, employers are free to prohibit employees from providing this care.
For countless doctors and nurses, the dictates of their conscience drive them to provide abortion care, despite the risks this poses to their professional career and personal safety. To give just a few examples: Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist while serving as an usher in his Lutheran Church, referred to his work providing abortion care as a “ministry.” Two members of Dr. Tiller’s staff echoed this view, stating respectively, “I felt I was doing the Lord’s work,” and “God put me here to do this work.” Dr. LeRory Carhart, an abortion provider and observant Methodist, stated in an interview, “I think what I’m doing is because of God, not in spite of God.” Dr. Sara Imershein has described providing abortion care as a “mitzvah,” and said that “No one should be able to step in the way of what I consider to be my moral obligation.” Last year, Dr. Willie Parker wrote an entire book describing his spiritual journey toward becoming an abortion provider and activist.
While some providers describe their work in explicitly religious terms, others portray it as a moral or ethical duty. Dr. Leah Torres, for example, has discussed her “moral and ethical obligation” to provide abortion care. Dr. David Gunn, who was also murdered by an anti-abortion terrorist, travelled 1,000 miles and worked six days a week providing abortion care because, according to his son, he believed “people would suffer without care if he refused.” Dr. Warren Hern has described his decision to provide abortion care even at great personal risk in deep-seated moral terms, stating that “women need my help” and that “If women are not free to make decisions about their own lives and health, they are not free. And if women are not free, none of us are free.”
As the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project explains in a comment we submitted to HHS, the agency’s proposed rule grants sweeping protections to those who would deny health care to patients, while doing nothing to protect those whose conscientious duty to provide care is prohibited by institutional policies. Not only do such imbalanced protections fail to safeguard patients’ health, they also fail to ensure the very right the rule claims to defend — the right of conscience.
Not only is this imbalance unfair, it is legally suspect. If nothing else, the religious freedom guarantees of the First Amendment mandate that the government not take sides in a religious debate, or advance particular religious views at the expense of others. The proposed rule does exactly that — providing near-absolute protections for anti-choice religious views but only extremely limited rights for pro-choice religious beliefs. (While providers cannot be punished for their activities outside the scope of their employment, they can be prohibited from acting on their religious obligation to provide comprehensive care within their job.)
The administration’s asserted interest in guaranteeing the right of “conscience” is belied by its one-sided policy, which protects only those to seek to deny health care and not those who seek to provide it. If HHS truly valued the right to act on one’s moral beliefs about abortion and other services, the proposed rule would protect providers who are forced to turn patients away in violation of their deeply-held beliefs.
