The Obama Administration’s Attack on Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (Advancing Religious Liberty )

Thirty-nine years ago, the United States Supreme Court recognized that medical  professionals, let alone others, have a right not to assist in abortions in  violation of their conscience.  What’s that?  Yes, I do have the date right.   I’m talking about Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.  While those  cases held, wrongly, that women and their doctors have a fundamental  constitutional right to kill an unborn child, they also recognized as important  predicates to those decisions the right NOT to participate in abortion in  violation of one’s conscience.  Friday’s  announcement that the Obama Administration would force employers – including  nonprofit religious employers – to pay for their employees’ contraception and  abortifacients is just the latest example of how the abortion industry and its  friends in the Obama Administration are attacking these well established rights  of conscience in ways even the authors of Roe and Doe did not  envision.

Even at the time of  Roe, some were concerned that legalized abortion would lead to  compelled participation in abortion, a concern that was not misplaced as ACLU  attorneys were working in Montana to force Catholic hospitals to perform  sterilizations.  The Supreme Court acknowledged but dismissed that concern,  holding only that “the attending physician, in consultation with his  patient, is free to determine, … the patient’s pregnancy should be  terminated.”  The Court cited favorably the resolution of the AMA House of  Delegates stating:

RESOLVED, That no physician or other professional personnel shall be  compelled to perform any act which violates his good medical judgment. Neither  physician, hospital, nor hospital personnel shall be required to perform any act  violative of personally held moral principles. In these circumstances, good  medical practice requires only that the physician or other professional  personnel withdraw from the case so long as the withdrawal is consistent with  good medical practice.

Similarly, in Doe v. Bolton while the Supreme Court struck down some  parts of a Georgia abortion law, it left standing a provision that allowed any  medical professional or hospital to decline to participate in abortions, saying  that this provision was an “appropriate protection to the individual and to the  denominational hospital.”  Thus, in the seminal abortion decisions that  President Obama and the abortion industry celebrate this weekend, the same Court  acknowledged the right NOT to assist in abortions in violation of  conscience.

To be absolutely sure however, the U.S. Congress passed the Church  Amendments, turning back ACLU efforts to treat Catholic hospitals receiving  Medicare funds as public hospitals and force them to perform sterilizations (and  ultimately abortions), and prohibiting recipients of certain federal funds from  requiring medical professionals or any person to participate in abortions,  sterilizations, or other procedures in violation of conscience.  This was so  uncontroversial it passed with only a single vote against in either house – a  vote total unthinkable even for a bill to honor mom and apple pie today.  In  fact, noted right wing extremist Senator Ted Kennedy spoke in favor of the law  on the floor of the Senate, saying that it protected the constitutional right  not to participate in abortion and he supported the “full protection to the  religious freedom of physicians and others.”  In 1973, as the opinions reflect,  there was no doubt that whatever right the penumbral emanations of the  constitution gave to women and doctors to participate in abortions, it certainly  protected the right not to participate in abortions or other medical procedures  that violated one’s conscience.

It is in the face of this history that the Obama Administration announced on  Friday that it will, with only a 1 year reprieve, fine virtually every  faith-based ministry in the country that does not pay for contraception and  abortifacients (Plan B, Ella, IUD, etc. included).  This decision is certainly  an affront to religious liberty –perhaps the greatest in our nation’s history.   But it is also completely unsupported, indeed rejected by the very cases that  the Obama Administration would use to support its cause.  Roe and  Doe, as bad as those decisions are, reject the Administration’s claim  that a woman’s “right” to contraception and abortifacients justify the federal  government compelling Christ-centered ministries to violate their conscience by  buying these for them.  When you hear abortion industry supporters rely upon  those decisions to justify this assault on conscience, don’t believe it.  Even  Roe itself is conservative compared to the radical anti-life advocacy  of the present Administration.

http://blogs.christianpost.com/liberty/2012/01/the-obama-administrations-attack-on-roe-v-wade-and-doe-v-bolton-26/

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