President Barack Obama promised to ensure “robust” conscience protections for medical personnel during his meeting last week with representatives of the Catholic press (including the Register’s publisher and editor in chief, Father Owen Kearns).

That sounds good, given that Catholics and other pro-life medical professionals deserve complete protection against any pressures to force them to participate in abortions and other procedures that conflict with their fundamental beliefs.

But Obama — who triggered concern about his commitment to protecting conscience rights by announcing in March that he intends to rescind the Bush adminstration’s January 2009 conscience regulation that enhanced the protection of conscience rights — also said during last week’s meeting that his revised conscience protections “certainly will not be weaker than what existed before the changes were made.”

That doesn’t sound nearly so good, since it was the inadequacy of the conscience protections that were in place before last January that prompted implementation of the new federal regulation.

So where is Obama actually headed on conscience rights? To get a clearer picture of the situation, I spoke about the issue via e-mail with Deirdre McQuade, assistant director for policy and communications of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.

The president told representatives of the Catholic press last week that his revised conscience provision will offer “robust” protections for medical personnel and “certainly will not be weaker than what existed before the [January 2009] changes were made.” If the new conscience clause is similar to the one that existed before January 2009, is this acceptable, from the perspective of the U.S. bishops?
Deirdre McQuade: President Obama’s stated commitment to conscience protection is a welcome word. I understand him to mean that — at the very least — he has no plans to undermine existing conscience-protection laws. So we have some assurance that we’ll be no worse off than before the short-lived Bush regulation went into effect.

But this assurance alone hardly makes for “robust” conscience protection, as those laws are — and have been for some time — pretty ineffectual.

The HHS received hundreds of thousands of public comments — at least 340,000 of which we know were in strong support of conscience rights. Their review is still under way, and we have not yet heard what the alternative proposal is. How will this administration act to ensure a robust conscience clause? We now have to wait and see.

Note: Presumably having a robust conscience clause means that ob-gyns who conscientiously object to performing abortions will not in any way be coerced into referring for them. Abortion advocates are pushing a so-called “duty to refer,” but this is completely unacceptable since referral is still participation in abortion and authentic professional duty requires doctors to preserve mother and child alike.

The president called the conscience-protection regulation by the Bush administration “a last-minute, 11th-hour change” and said “it hadn’t been properly reviewed and thought through.” Is this an accurate statement about the process employed by the previous administration prior to implementing the conscience-protection regulation?
The regulation was proposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2008, and then issued in final form on Dec. 19, 2008, after a lengthy period for public comments. It sought to implement and enforce three long-standing federal laws that protect individual and institutional health-care providers from being forced to participate in procedures such as abortion to which they have a moral or religious objection. (For texts of these three laws, see www.usccb.org/prolife/Dec08fedconslaws.pdf.)

So while it went into effect at the end of the Bush administration, the regulation was not borne of a hasty effort.

Why did the U.S. bishops and other pro-life groups and individuals call for enhanced conscience protection — what problems do pro-life medical personnel face under existing conscience-protection laws?
While federal conscience-protection laws have been in effect for as long as 36 years, some state and local governments, as well as professional societies and advocacy groups, still attack conscience rights as though they do not exist — and many health-care providers do not even know they have these rights. Enforcement is also hampered by undefined terms in the laws and by failure to identify a federal office responsible for defending these conscience rights.

Medical professionals — whose primary ethical mandate is to “do no harm” — have been fired, threatened with job loss, denied promotions, and coerced for their refusal to perform, refer for, or be trained in the harmful practice of abortion. Medical residents have been denied training opportunities and prospective medical students have been refused admission to medical school.

Health-care institutions are being pressured, too. In the past decade, New York and California have considered laws to force Catholic hospitals to provide abortions and other “services” against Catholic teaching. Many pro-abortion groups have launched campaigns to make health-care providers violate their consciences, and groups such as “Merger Watch” were founded specifically for this purpose.

Federal laws protecting conscience rights must be clear, and fully enforced, if these rights are not to be lost.

What consultations has the bishops’ conference had with the White House regarding the new conscience clause?
Cardinal George as president of the USCCB, Cardinal Rigali as chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop Murphy as chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development have all addressed conscience rights with the current administration. Most recently, Cardinal George welcomed President Obama’s support for conscience rights and said that the bishops “look forward to working with the administration and other policy makers to advance this goal.”

The bishops’ primary contribution to the conversation was their official “Comments on Proposed Rescission of HHS Conscience Regulation” submitted during the public comment period on March 23, 2009. We continue to hope and pray that the administration will take those comments into consideration.

I invite National Catholic Register readers to join us praying for conscience protection. A prayer for that intention may be found at: www.usccb.org/conscienceprotection/prayer.shtml. 

What now?
Attention now shifts to Congress, where conscience protection may come under direct attack in the fiscal year 2010 appropriations process.

The Weldon Conscience Protection Amendment to the Labor/HHS appropriations bill is absolutely vital and must remain intact. It prohibits the disbursement of funds to federal agencies and programs and state and local governments that discriminate against health-care providers who decline to provide, pay for or refer for abortions. The USCCB will, if necessary, work hard to ensure that this remains our federal funding policy in the future.