United States
General Legal Commentary
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Symposium: Conscience, conditions, and access to
civil society
- Richard Garnett | It is striking how easy it has become for a person to
stumble into the status of a symbol – or, these days, a
viral meme. Jack Phillips is, or was until fairly recently,
a skilled cake artist with a small business, Masterpiece
Cakeshop, in suburban Denver. Today, he is a litigant in the
Supreme Court of the United States and regarded by many as
embodying the tension – increasingly, the conflict – between
religious conscience and equality. . .
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Testimony of Most Rev. C. Lori,
on behalf of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops
- Bishop C. Lori |. . . Religious liberty is also prior to the state itself.
It is not merely a privilege that the government grants us and so may take
away at will. Instead, religious liberty is inherent in our very humanity,
hard-wired into each and every one of us by our Creator. Thus government has
a perennial obligation to acknowledge and protect religious liberty as
fundamental, no matter the moral and political trends of the moment. . .
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Mandated Contraceptive Coverage: A Public Policy Nightmare
- Sheryl K. Albers | Every biennium, legislators introduce new mandates on our health
insurance carriers, demanding that insurers pay for personal
conveniences outside the boundaries of medically-necessary treatment.
The contraceptive coverage mandate stands as one of the most dramatic of
these proposals. It forces people of faith to fund chemically-induced
abortions, puts matters of personal convenience and choice on the same
level of as medically-necessary treatment, requires coverage of drugs
which can endanger the safety of women, and increases insurance costs
for employers and individuals. . .
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Coakley wrong on conscience rights of
pro-lifers
- Matt Bowman | Yesterday, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who is
running for U.S. Senate,
was asked about doctors who object to drugs that contracept or kill
embryos. She said, "You can have religious freedom but you probably
shouldn't work in the emergency room." . . .According to [Attorney]
General Coakley's attitude, religious freedom means the "freedom" for
Christians to be driven from the caring professions altogether. . . .
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Protecting
the Health Care Providers' Right of Conscience
- Teresa Stanton Collett | [Describing cases in Alaska, Texas and California] . . .The common
thread running through these cases is the insistence that health care
providers comply with patient demands, regardless of the nature of the
requests--and regardless of any conflicting demands of the health care
providers' consciences. . .[
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Conscience and the Healthcare Worker
- Marianne Linane |
Healthcare advances are rapidly changing treatments available for any
number of conditions. Some of these treatments create a moral dilemma
for those in the healthcare field and they are being faced with a
decision to either deny delivery of service and perhaps compromise their
employment, or compromise their conscience. This paper is a brief
summary of history, current law, and attempts being made to resolve the
conflict. . .
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Protecting
the Rights of Conscience of Health Care Providers (Review)
- Sean Murphy | In 1993 Professor Lynn Wardle published a detailed survey of what he
called the "patchwork" of American protection of conscience laws. The
article not only addressed numerous relevant issues, but included
extensive citations of American case law and statutes. While it is a
particularly valuable resource for U.S. researchers, a number of his
observations and arguments have more general application. . .
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To
Market, To Market
Responding to Vischer, Robert,
The Pharmacist Wars
The American Enterprise Online,
14 February, 2006
- Sean Murphy | . . . It is remarkable that a free-market advocate should assign the state the
function of ensuring access to a product - an economic function admirably
achieved by free markets - while denying the state a role in the
preservation of fundamental freedoms - a political function for which it
exists. Happily, it is possible to resolve this contradiction, restoring to
the market and to the state the functions proper to each, and to do so in a
way that may prove congenial to Professor Vischer.. . .
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Should the Obama Conscience Rules Seek to Protect Persons or Provide
Benefits?
- Christopher
Tollefsen |
The state is required to protect persons not just from physical harm but
from being forced to violate their limited but definite freedom of
conscience. . . President Obama signaled his intention to repeal a rule
promulgated in the last days of the Bush administration that codified
previous law ensuring that no health care providers at institutions
receiving federal funds should be discriminated against for refusing to
participate in abortion or sterilization procedures. . .
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Protection
for Rights of Conscience in American Law: First Rights or Last Rites?
(Draft)
- Lynn D. Wardle | Profound moral issues going to the heart of individual religious
beliefs and moral conscience are arising in many aspects of health care.
. . Regularly. . . the media blare stories about shocking abuses of the
rights of conscience of individuals and groups of individuals in the
health care field . . . Equally often, the media shouts about
sympathetic cases in which health care services or medications are
denied by persons and institutions with conscientious objections. . .
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Becket Fund Letter to the US Department of Health and Human Services
- Kevin J. Hasson | We recently became aware of the ACLU's efforts to ensnare your office
in upending this nation's longstanding commitment to protecting
conscience rights in the medical profession. . . The ACLU has no
business radically re-defining the meaning of "emergency health care
[and their effort] is . . . contrary to the text and purpose of the
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act ("EMTALA"), the very
law the ACLU cites as the basis for its proposal. We will represent,
pro bono, any religious hospital or its personnel that HHS
threatens because of their conscientious objection to abortion. And we
will, if necessary, sue to block any such proposed policy . . .
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Text
Abortion, Conscience, and Doctors
- Christopher Kaczor | Suggestions to end conscience protection ignore the importance of
conscience and rely on a circular-and baseless-understanding of a
woman's "right" to abortion. Following such suggestions would be
detrimental to the entire health care system.
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Have US conscience clause protections been eviscerated?
- James S. Cole | Can an American nurse refuse to participate in a medical procedure
repugnant to her conscience? As of last week, it appears that the answer
is no. A Federal Court has ruled that a nurse who was told to assist in
a late-term abortion or lose her job cannot file a grievance. . .
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Text
Pulling the plug on the conscience clause
- Wesley J. Smith | . . .The ongoing transformation in the methods and ethics of medicine
raises profound moral questions for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and
others who believe in the traditional virtues of Hippocratic medicine
that proscribe abortion and assisted suicide and compel physicians to
"do no harm.". . . Tolerance toward dissenters of what might be called
the "new medicine" is quickly eroding. . .
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Roe to the rescue?
Roe v. Wade could prove an unlikely source of pro-life conscience
protection
- Mark Rienzi | . . . Pro-lifers have long argued that Roe and Casey
were wrongly decided, and that the Supreme Court has no business writing
new rights into the Constitution. Nevertheless, a close examination of
the Court's stated test yields a surprising result: the right to refuse
to perform an abortion actually has better historical support, and
better satisfies the Court's stated tests, than the abortion right
itself. Thus, so long as Roe and Caseyremain the law,
their reasoning also protects the right of healthcare providers to
refuse to participate in abortions. . .
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Taking (Conscience) Rights Seriously
- Melissa Moschella | . . . The key to understanding
conscience rights correctly is to recognize that there is a world of
difference between a law that makes me do something I don't want
to do, and a law that makes me do something I have an obligation
not to do. . .
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Repelling the Attack on Conscience
- Helen Alvaré | . . .If opponents of conscience protection want to
encourage high-quality, readily available health care for
women, especially vulnerable women, they could not do better
than to ally themselves with supporters of conscience
protections. In the United States, this group is regularly
comprised of the kinds of providers and institutions ready
to assist the most vulnerable women, even with free or
low-cost care. . .
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Re: American Medical Association Resolution 218
(June, 2000)
- Francis Cardinal George, OMI*
| . . .As an active participant in and sponsor of the largest nonprofit
healthcare network in this area, I find the quiet little note at the end of
this resolution strangely naïve. It says: "No Significant Fiscal
Impact." Does anyone really believe that driving the largest
not-for-profit healthcare network in the nation out of business would have
no significant fiscal impact? . . . It would have an enormous adverse impact on some of the
poorest people in our nation, who turn to Catholic health facilities to
receive help in times of need, regardless of their ability to pay.
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Conscientious Abortions?
We Don't Need New Laws
Protecting Abortionists
- Richard M. Doerflinger | If we legally protect a "right of conscience" to refuse to assist or
perform abortions, shouldn't we also protect "conscience-based" decisions to
provide abortions? So asks Dr. Lisa Harris of the University of
Michigan, in a recent
commentary
in the New England Journal of Medicine (further publicized at a
Washington Post
blog).
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