Tony Perkins Responds to Pseudo-Compromise of Conscience Rights Mandate
by FRC Media Office
February 10, 2012
Category: Conscience protection
Should Catholics Have a Conscience?
by Krystle Weeks
November 22, 2011
Recently, Hot Air reported that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi doesn’t understand why the U.S. Catholic bishops are against requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptives, including known abortifacients. She belittles Catholics who object, conscientiously, to paying for or performing services that their church teaches are wrong.
Perhaps she should consider the Catholic Catechism, which says that “Moral conscience, present at the heart of the person, enjoins him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil.” What could be more good than defending life? And what could be more evil than to disregard it, or denigrate those who seek to uphold it.
Even though the former Speaker is Catholic, she seems to have long forgotten that Catholicism is unequivocal in support of the sanctity of human life, from conception onward. This teaching is discussed throughout the Catechism, and there is even a section regarding the usage of abortifacients, and the Catholic Church’s stance against the use. Continue reading »
A Snapshot from the House Health Subcommittee Hearing on Obamacare’s “Contraceptive Mandate”
by Jeanne Monahan
November 22, 2011
On Wednesday, November 2, Representative Pitts (R-PA), in his capacity as Chairman of the
Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Health, convened a hearing to discuss the controversial HHS interim final rule on women’s preventive services which forces all health plans to cover, with no cost-sharing, the full range of FDA-approved contraceptives, including drugs and devices that can destroy life.
Interesting moments from the hearing, “Do New Health Law Mandates Threaten Conscience Rights and Access to Care?” are included below, as well as a few fact checks and a link to the full transcript. Continue reading »
A Primer on Conscience Protection
by Jared Bridges
March 9, 2009
Conscience protection is in the news again, and not just on this blog. On our sister blog at FRC Action, FRCA’s newly-minted Senior Vice President Tom McClusky has posted a primer on what these regulations are, and whom they protect:
These conscience protections are important because powerful interests are inclined to force health care workers and others to participate, directly or indirectly, in morally controversial procedures. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists and others have been denied employment, dismissed, or penalized because of objections to abortion, contraception or the morning-after pill. The same pressure will almost certainly be applied to force conscientious objectors to participate in reproductive technology, eugenic screening, and in euthanasia and assisted suicide, particularly where such things are legal or are tolerated.
FRC Submits Comments to HHS on Conscience Protection
by Chris Gacek
October 4, 2008
On August 26, 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) asked the public for comments about rules it proposed to protect the rights of conscience of health care providers – in particular, to permit them to refuse to assist in, provide, or refer patients for abortions. These conscience rights were created by three historic federal statutes known more commonly as the Church, Coats, and Weldon Amendments.
The Family Research Council and several other groups filed comments on September 25th responding to HHS. Get a copy of them here.
Here is a summary of our main points:
- HHS’s proposed rules (regulations) are needed because many participants in the health care system are violating the Church, Coats, and Weldon Amendments. Many intended beneficiaries of these landmark civil rights laws – intended to protect health care providers’ right of religious and moral conscience – do not know their rights under the law. HHS regulations are needed to clarify the extent of these statutory protections.
- HHS should adopt a fertilization-based definition of pregnancy (and thus abortion) because that is consistent with the prevailing medical dictionary definitions, religious thought, and medical science on when life begins: these are, after all, conscience protections, so they should protect the conscience’s of the various health care providers.
- Even if HHS does not adopt a fertilization-based definition of pregnancy, it should reject the implantation-based definition in HHS’s human-subject regulations for a number of reasons.
o For example, non-uterine, ectopic pregnancies demonstrate that uterine implantation cannot define the onset of pregnancy.
- As a final alternative, HHS should recognize that the reasonable, subjective religious or moral conviction of the individual or institutional health care provider should govern, given the statutory focus on protecting conscience. Religious freedom and conscience in this country plainly reflect the views of the individual or institution, not the views of third parties.
- Recognizing a right of conscience does not discriminate against women or violate any concepts mandated in Roe v. Wade and its progeny which do not purport to require any particular health care provider to participate in abortions.
- HHS should enforce the Church, Coats, and Weldon Amendments in the same manner as it enforces other civil rights statutes, like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
- HHS’s Title X regulations, which require grant recipients to counsel and refer for abortions, appear to violate the law as set forth in the Church, Coats, and Weldon Amendments.
