Should we allow health care workers ' doctors, nurses, pharmacists, even ambulance drivers ' to threaten their patients' lives because treating them would violate their personal morals?
That's the question behind so-called conscience clauses
defined by the National Conference of State Legislatures as the right to refuse to perform certain services based on a violation of personal beliefs or values. Since the 1970s, conscience clauses have existed to protect doctors and institutions that refuse to perform abortions. However, anti-abortion activists have pushed lawmakers to broaden the clauses to include all health care workers who want to deny a procedure on moral grounds ' even if doing so endangers patients.
Personally, I might be more sympathetic toward the concept of moral refusal if it hadn't almost killed my mother.
My mom's run-in with moral refusal happened in 1992, when I was in kindergarten and she was pregnant with her third child. After a routine ultrasound, the doctor returned and somberly informed her that the pregnancy was no longer viable. The baby had stopped developing and she was bound to miscarry within a few days.
While my mom was disappointed, she wasn't surprised: As someone who'd had two successful pregnancies, she already suspected something was not right this time. She asked the doctor when she planned to perform a D&C ' dilation and curettage, the procedure used to safely remove a miscarried baby.
I can't do that the doctor replied.
Why? Hadn't she just confirmed that the pregnancy was not viable?
I won't perform any type of abortion procedure she said. (D&C operations are also used in live abortions.) After declining to refer her to another doctor, she sent my mom home to wait for a natural miscarriage.
This course of action turned out to be life-threatening. The very next morning, my mom called my grandma to ask for a ride back to the hospital. Within twenty minutes, she was losing consciousness and bleeding so severely that my grandma had no choice but to call 911. The untreated miscarriage had caused a massive hemorrhage. She was rushed to a different hospital, where the surgeons finally performed a D&C ' the procedure the previous doctor, for the sake of her personal morality, had flat-out refused to do.
While I always knew my mom had a miscarriage, I didn't hear the full story until last summer, long after I became involved with conservative and anti-abortion politics. I was stunned. Had the pro-life movement really gone this far ' to the point of endangering mothers' lives in order to protect medical workers' consciences?
In many cases, the answer is yes ' and we have conscience clauses to thank for that. In Mississippi, it is now perfectly legal for an ambulance driver to refuse to transport a woman to an abortion clinic, even if she's hemorrhaging or experiencing a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. And if she dies as a result? Too bad ' the state's morality clause says that the driver doesn't have to be disciplined, much less fired. His right to conscience is more important than her right to life.
If you think such extremism is limited to the Deep South, you're wrong. Many anti-abortion advocates view Mississippi's morality clause as a model for legislation they hope to push through in other states.
This is frightening news for women. As I've discovered since hearing my mom's story, slogans about abortion being a matter of defending women's lives isn't always drama-queen hyperbole. There are several pregnancy-related conditions that, left untreated, can be extremely dangerous for the mother. Properly treating them usually requires killing the fetus ' but isn't it better to save the mother's life instead of letting both die?
Apparently not, according to some anti-abortion groups. The American Life League declares on its Web site that there is no problem so severe that it would justify killing the child.
Unfortunately, that sentiment has infected the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt is currently in the process of enacting a proposal to strengthen federal conscience clauses. According to Leavitt, weakening conscience clause laws would undermine the most fundamental moral underpinning of freedom of expression and action.
If he gets his way, Leavitt should hope that his own daughter never finds herself in my mother's situation. Then an emergency room worker could choose to let her bleed to death on the operating table because treating her would violate his conscience. -
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Ashley Herzog
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