Nineteen Democratic Attorneys General have banded together and stated their opposition to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed rule that would better ensure the conscience protections of health care providers within religious or nonprofit organizations. The rule would protect employers who have religious objections to covering the costs of abortion, abortion inducing drugs, sterilization, or assisted suicide through the healthcare plans offered to their employees. It would also protect employees from being forced to perform operations or procedures with which they have a religious objection to.
Nineteen of twenty-two current Democrat Attorneys General filed comments in opposition to the rule, arguing that the proposed rule would result in a substantially negative change to the way that healthcare is delivered, but at the expense of employers and states, and reducing the options available to patients.
Those who support life at any stage and recognize that any life has value no matter the circumstances argue that doctors and other medical professionals should be able to opt out of performing any medical “services” resulting in the loss of human life or that otherwise would violate their religious or moral convictions.
The nineteen Attorneys General who united in submitting the comments calling the rule “excessively broad” and “unconstitutional” are New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Washington state.
Their opposition represents a broader shift in growing popular opinion that not only should acts such as abortions, sterilizations, and assisted suicides be legal, but also that medical professionals should be forced to comply with a patient’s (or patients family, or guardian) wishes.
Euthanasia activists have also recently been pushing an agenda that would force nursing home staff to intentionally starve dementia patients (even if the patients willingly eat) once the patient loses possession of certain cognitive faculties.
Such lobbying efforts would conflict with the express reason many physicians and medical professionals entered the field of medicine. It would certainly by a violation of the Hippocratic oath so many of them swore to uphold.
Consider what the enactment of legislation requiring that medical professionals be forced to administer assisted suicide antidotes, or abortion inducing drugs. How many of the currently experienced practicing physicians would leave the medical field and cease the practice of medicine if they were forced to inject a patient with a lethal injection? How many caregivers and nurses would live their field of expertise if they were required to starve a patient for no other reason than that the patient is experiencing normal symptoms of the progression of age?
The nineteen Attorneys General are deathly wrong in advocating against the proposed rule. Attempting to forcefully violate one’s medical conscience can only result in a decreased skill level within the medical field.
