Protecting Medical Professionals Against Abortion?

'Scuse me, why do they get a choice? If you are an obstetrician at some point you may NEED to do an abortion. I know they teach this in medical school. Your personal or religious beliefs should not stop you from doing your job. If they do, then you need to find another job.

Plan Would Protect Health-Care Workers Who Object to Abortion

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 2008; 5:45 PM



The Bush administration today announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs.

The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.

"People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their violates their own conscience."

The proposed regulation, which could go into effect after a 30-day comment period, was welcomed by conservative groups, abortion opponents and others as necessary to safeguard workers from being fired, disciplined or penalized in other ways. Women's health advocates, family planning advocates, abortion rights activists and others, however, condemned the regulation, saying it could create sweeping obstacles to a variety of health services, including abortion, family planning, end-of-life care and possibly a wide range of scientific research.

"It's breathtaking," said Robyn S. Shapiro, a bioethicist and lawyer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "The impact could be enormous."

The regulation drops the most controversial language in a draft version that would have explicitly defined an abortion for the first time in a federal law or regulation as anything that interfered with a fertilized egg after conception. But both supporters and critics said the regulation remained broad enough to protect pharmacists, doctors, nurses and others from providing birth control pills, Plan B emergency contraception and other forms of contraception, and explicitly allows workers to withhold information about such services and refuse to refer patients elsewhere.

"The Bush administration's proposed regulation poses a serious threat to women's health care by limiting the rights of patients to receive complete and accurate health information and services," said Cecile Richards of the Planned Parenthood Federal of America. "Women's ability to manage their own health care is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology."

Leavitt said he requested the new regulation after becoming alarmed by reports that health-care workers were being pressured to perform duties they found repugnant. He cited moves by two professional organizations for obstetricians and gynecologists that he said might require doctors who object to abortions to refer patients to other physicians who would.

"People should not be forced to say or do things that they find morally wrong," Leavitt said.

An early draft of the regulation that leaked in July triggered a flood of criticism from women's health activists, family planning advocates, members of Congress and others. Concern focused on fears the definition of abortion could be interpreted to include many forms of widely used contraception.

"Words in that draft led some to misconstrue the department's intent," Leavitt told reporters today during a telephone news conference. "This regulation ... is consistent with my intent to focus squarely on the issue of conscience rights. This specifically goes to the issue of abortion and conscience."

But when pressed about whether the regulation would protect health-care workers who consider birth control pills, Plan B and other forms of contraception to be equivalent to abortion Leavitt said: "This regulation does not seek to resolve any ambiguity in that area. It focuses on abortion and focuses on physicians' conscience in relation to that."

Both supporters and critics said the language remained broad enough to apply to contraceptives, as well as many other areas in medicine.

"I think this provides broad application not just to abortion and sterilization but any other type of morally objectionable procedure and research activity," said David Stevens of the Catholic Medical Association. "We think it's badly needed. Our members are facing discrimination every day and as we get into human cloning and all sorts of possibilities it's going to become even more important."

Leavitt stressed that there was nothing in the regulation that would prevent any organization from providing any type of care.

"There is nothing in this rule that would in any way change a patient's right to a legal procedure," he said.

The regulation, which would cost more than $44 million to implement, was aimed at enforcing several federal laws that have been on the books since the 1970s that were aimed primarily at protecting doctors and nurses who did not want to perform abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision, Leavitt said.

But critics said they remained alarmed at the scope of the regulation, which could apply to a wide range of health-care workers. For example, the regulation would cover "participating in any activity with a reasonable connection to the objectionable procedure, including referrals, training, and other arrangements for offending procedures.

"For example, an operating room nurse would assist in the performance of surgical procedures; an employee whose task it is to clean the instruments used in a particular procedure would be considered to assist in the performance of the particular procedure," the regulation states.

The anti-choice stance is just going to drive more and more of them to stop doing surgery. It's just like tons of doctors have stopped delivering babies. They got tired of being sued every time someone's child was born with abnormalities.

Jesus, what next.

I still think the frosting on the cake was when the sperm donor was sued by the ex-friend lesbian for child support. That judge should be removed from the bench.

There's never was a guarantee that individual Doctors, NPs, or clinics would provide abortion, or any other women's medical services, on demand. I have been refused tubal ligation by more than one doctor. A coworker's doctor refused to administer an amniocentesis and she later had a very late term miscarriage. A friend, who went to college in Colorado, had to wait until she flew home to California to get an abortion because none where available in her area or surrounding cities.

Government, medical professionals, and fringe groups try to rule over women's bodies, or at least make options very difficult, all the time. Why does it take the proposal of a new regulation to bring the disappearance of reproductive freedom to the fore?

I thought we (relatively recently) passed legislation to prevent doctor's/physicians/nurses/etc. from denying service based on their personal beliefs... I must be mistaken.

I guess I never will understand why peeps don't use protection and take necessary precautions. With aids out there, I wouldn't touch anybody without a lot of protection. Maybe, a whole box of protection, and tons of foams.

If you're not prepared to do the whole job, don't do it. Most obstetricians will, at some point, be called upon to carry out an abortion and most pharmacists will be asked for contraceptives. If a healthcare professional is not prepared to carry out all procedures and duties required by their discipline, they should really be working in another field. Once you start down the road of allowing opt-outs based on conscience/religion/prejudice, where do you draw the line? What would the reaction be if a white or black doctor refused to treat a patient because of their skin colour? Will Christians be allowed to opt out of treating Muslim or Sikh patients?

It's a slightly different issue, but we had a big furore over here a few months back when a Christian registrar refused to marry a gay couple. She was backed by the courts because it went against her religious beliefs.

I don't think you are thinking this thru real well. If a person is forced to do things to which he/she is morally opposed, then you would eliminate the *conscientious objector* in the military. A senior officer could compel someone to do something they oppose.

BTW why would you want someone to do a procedure on you if they don't do them routinely?

Also the idea that the government has no right to tell a woman what to do with her body may be sound, but the government is ALWAYS telling people what they can and can't do with their bodies. There are laws against riding motorcycles w/o a helmet. the government restricts what drugs we can use and won't let us use heroin. The government won't let us use steroids or growth hormones. It restricts alcohol. We have to wear seatbelts.

I really am disgusted with this administration.
Why won't people stand up and say we don't want the government telling us how to act and what we can/cannot put into our bodies if we choose to do so.
When did we become such wimps? Why is he still in office?
Fuck.
cigarbabe

Okay. I don't think anyone is trying to say that these services aren't already difficult to obtain in many areas. Can you see the argument that regulation might make it harder still? At least without regulation there might still be a way to get someone to grudgingly give you information. Now, they don't even have to educate young women on their options.

What's next is allowing medical professionals who belong to the Very Holy Church of Scientology to not work at all (and still get paid).

Where do I sign?

Some other issues to think about:

Why in this day and age is someone having reproductive sex when they only wanted to have recreational sex? Doesn't that mean they were being careless with their body? So in a sense you are saying for that time when they had repro sex instead of recre sex, a man and woman were careless with their bodies but now that the recre sex became repro sex, they are demanding that WE respect their bodies.

In my state you can walk right into a pharmacy and get the morning after pill, no questions asked. I did it as a test. No prescription, just ask for it.

Hootie is right.

What kills me is that the sore loser Hillary tribe, even in the face of shit like this, are dead set on sabotaging the Obama campaign just to prove their point.

Hell truly hath no fury like a woman scorned.

The "universality" clause really shoots this one down. These officials wouldn't feel too happy about waiters and cook refusing to prepare their food if they felt morally opposed to have politicians behave. Like someone said earlier, if you got all this training and just decide to up and not wanna do your job at your convenience, then you need to find some other vocation.