At Progressive Revival, Sally Steenland cuts through the “media hype” surrounding President Obama’s plan to rescind President Bush’s “conscience” regulation governing health care providers:
A progressive view of conscience recognizes that diverse moral beliefs and worldviews exist, and this is a good thing. But when different beliefs clash, one of them should not automatically trump all others. This means that not just the conscience of the health care provider is at stake here. We also have to consider the conscience of the patient—a mother, let’s say, who relies on contraception to be a morally responsible parent, with enough emotional, spiritual, and physical energy to care for her existing children. Or the conscience of a father who seeks to be sterilized for the same good reasons.
There’s also the conscience of the doctor who has prescribed certain treatments to provide his or her patients with the care they need. Prior to the Bush rule, the law protected doctors who did not want to provide abortion care and those who did. The Bush rule, however, provides privilege to only one perspective and excludes all others.
In truth, health care providers who refuse to perform certain treatments on moral grounds have a competing moral responsibility to their patients—one that is based on professional ethics. In considering matters of conscience, this obligation must be weighed as well.
Read the full piece here.