Defend the Rights of Health Care Workers

HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt is proposing regulations to enforce current laws that protect the conscience rights of health care workers. Congress has passed three laws (Church Amendments, Coats Amendment, and the Hyde/Weldon Amendment) over the past 35 years protecting such rights; however, no regulations have ever been implemented. If issued, the proposed regulations would ensure that health care workers in programs that receive federal funds, including federal, state and local government programs, do not discriminate against health care workers who object to participating in such practices as abortion and sterilization. We need you to submit public comments to HHS in support of regulations to enforce current law because groups like Planned Parenthood have supplied thousands of comments to HHS opposing any regulations that protect doctors, nurses, pharmacists or others' conscience. The deadline for submitting a comment (which will be viewable by the public) is September 25, 2008.

In submitting your public comments, please provide information to HHS as to your knowledge or lack of knowledge of the conscience protections contained in current law. For instance, did you know that health care providers have conscience protections, or are there examples where an organization you are affiliated with did not know of these rights? Provide examples where a lack of knowledge of conscience rights led to coercion to violate conscience.

Additional key points:

• Please implement regulations that enforce current conscience laws for health care workers, including students in health care schools, many of whom are unaware of their conscience rights.
• Health care workers should not be forced to participate in abortion or sterilization programs, whether directly by performing abortions or referring for abortions.
• Current law protects health care workers from being discriminated against when they refuse to engage in abortion or other practices to which they have ethical, moral, or religious objections.
• The HHS regulations should define abortion to include the destruction of human life before or after implantation. Such a definition will protect those who reasonably believe that destroying embryos by drugs which may prevent implantation constitutes abortion. Health care workers should not be forced to dispense or prescribe drugs, or perform or refer for practices that they believe involve an abortion.
• Even if there is dispute about whether certain drugs cause an abortion, the conscience rights of those who think those drugs cause abortion even before implantation should be protected.