OPINION:
In a lengthy, deeply partisan — and, in typical Biden fashion, meandering — speech on health care policy on Feb. 28 in Virginia Beach, the president began innocently enough, effusively praising the unstinting devotion to duty of health care professionals.
“[Y]ou docs are good, but if there’s any angels in heaven, they’re all nurses — male and female,” President Biden gushed (inadvertently debunking the left’s science-denying insistence that there are more than two genders). “You know why? You guys let us, you guys make us, allow us to live. Nurses make you want to live.”
Mr. Biden reminisced about a military nurse who went to great lengths to comfort him at what’s now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after his treatment for two brain aneurysms in 1988, and about other doctors and nurses who cared for his son Joseph “Beau” Biden III while he was dying of brain cancer in 2015.
But even as the president was praising the health care professionals to their faces, his administration was preparing to stick a radical regulatory shiv in their backs.
“The Biden Administration is leaving no stone unturned to further its pro-abortion agenda,” the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee warned in a March 2 email blast. “In the process, the Administration is renewing its attack on freedom of conscience.”
The CWA alert explained:
“1. The Administration published a proposal to expand abortifacient coverage by stripping secular pro-life individuals and groups of protection from mandated abortifacient coverage.”
“2. The Administration also published a proposal to disable protections for pro-life health care professionals and groups from being forced to facilitate abortions.”
The deadline for public comments on those proposed rule changes — which would undo protections put in place by the Trump administration — is Monday, March 6.
Federal law has long protected health care professionals’ right not to be compelled to participate in certain procedures to which they might object, such as abortions and sterilizations. (Going forward, those protections likely will be also needed to protect doctors and nurses from being forced to assist with the provision of what the left has euphemistically dubbed “gender-affirming care” — that is, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and body-mutilating surgery to gender-confused patients, including minors.)
The Biden administration is seeking to gut rules that protect not only health care workers but also hospitals, recipients of funds from the Department of Health and Human Services, and others “from having to provide, participate in, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for certain procedures, if doing so would violate their sincere religious beliefs or moral convictions,” warns Melanie Israel, a policy analyst with the DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family at The Heritage Foundation.
This administration’s divisive attack on the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, hospitals, health insurance organizations and others that oppose abortion comes from the same Mr. Biden who, in his inauguration speech in January 2021, promised — falsely, as it turns out — to be a unifier and a president for all Americans, including those who didn’t vote for him.
If, as expected, the president goes ahead with these gratuitous rule changes aimed at stripping pro-life health care professionals and institutions of their conscience protections, the administration will surely — and deservedly — find itself hauled into court.
Ultimately, however, those protections need to be codified into federal law through legislation like SB 401, the Conscience Protection Act of 2021.
Introduced just over two years ago by Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, the bill has languished ever since in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The Conscience Protection Act needs to be resuscitated and enacted, stat.
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