President Joe Biden continued his methodical war against people of faith last week when his Department of Health and Human Services issued new regulations rescinding conscience protections for doctors and nurses who are forced by their employers to perform procedures that violate their beliefs.
At a time when many states are mandating healthcare professionals perform highly controversial procedures such as abortion, sterilization, assisted suicide, and gender transition surgeries, Biden’s actions will only force more religious observers out of the healthcare profession entirely.
The HHS is charged with being the first responder for over a dozen federal laws designed to protect religious freedom, including the Coats-Snowe Amendment, the Church Amendments, the Weldon Amendment, and various protections written into Medicare and Medicaid. In 2019, the Trump administration issued new regulations that beefed up these religious liberty protections, making it clear that the laws were primarily concerned with “the free exercise of religious beliefs.”
Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion outfits quickly condemned the rule, claiming that it “would have allowed healthcare providers to deny treatment or medical information to patients based on their personal beliefs,” which is true. But then Planned Parenthood went on to claim, “This rule would have put the beliefs of health care workers over the health and safety of their patients and put lives at risk.”
While it is true the rule was designed to put the beliefs of healthcare workers over the immediate desires of patients, there is no evidence that allowing the rule would have put anybody’s life at risk. The United States is brimming with doctors all too willing to abort babies and disfigure children.
Biden’s new rule undoes the presumption in favor of religious freedom and instead calls for a “balance” between the “liberty and human dignity” of doctors and nurses and the “autonomy rights” of patients, which the regulation specifically notes includes “safe legal abortions.”
Despite the fact that this “balancing” test is written nowhere in statute, we have already seen it play out in Biden’s Justice Department. In 2021, the Biden administration dropped a lawsuit that had been initiated through an HHS conscience complaint against a Vermont hospital that had forced a Catholic nurse to participate in an elective abortion.
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Unfortunately, Biden’s rollback of conscience protections for healthcare providers is just part of his administration’s much larger effort to push religious believers out of public life. Biden has also kicked Franciscan priests out of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, made it harder for faith-based organizations to contract with federal agencies to provide social services, and denied the right of Christian adoption agencies to participate in HHS programs.
Democrats in Congress are too beholden to the abortion lobby to do anything legislatively to fix what Biden has done. And even if they did, the Biden administration has already inserted a balancing test into the enforcement of these laws that is nowhere in the statute. It will be up to the courts to set Biden straight after other doctors or nurses have been forced to violate their consciences or lose their jobs. It shouldn’t have to come to that, but that is where we are.