I wonder what President Obama's new conscience clause will say. Will medical personnel who object to certain procedures, medications, etc. be forced to perform or prescribe them, or will they be permitted to opt out? This morning I read the following:
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.
Read the rest here: Conscience Rights and Obama: National Catholic Register
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