The Devaluing of Life at Top Health Agency
- Mar 3, 2009 - 3
Its mission statement is noble. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) bills itself as the “government’s principal agency for protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves.”
Yet two recent moves surrounding the nation’s leading health agency threaten to undermine the department’s stated mission. If implemented, these moves will put the agency at increasing odds both with the unborn and individuals who seek their protection.
With a one-two punch to the pro-life movement, the Obama administration has begun the process of rescinding a federal rule within HHS that protects health-care workers from violating their conscience on abortion and has nominated someone with a troubling record on abortion to the department’s highest post. These come as two more blows to a pro-life movement that has already suffered a series of jabs since the changing of the White House guard in January.
One month prior to leaving office, President Bush issued regulations under HHS to enforce existing, though unimplemented and often violated, laws to protect health-care workers from being discriminated against for refusing to participate in abortions or other medical procedures that would violate their religious convictions. Any hospital, nursing home, medical school, or doctor’s office failing to comply would be severed from federal funding. These protections could be short-lived. The Obama administration is currently reviewing the policy with the intent of significantly weakening it. The proposed policy will soon be available to the public for a 30-day comment period.
Such a move would put conscience and career on a collision course for individuals who believe in the sanctity of every human life. It would discourage many Christians from pursuing medical professions altogether for fear that choosing to follow their religious convictions could cost them their jobs. Others already in the medical field could find themselves searching for a new line of work.
Another apparent shift toward the devaluing of life at HHS comes with President Obama’s nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) as the department’s secretary. The governor, who would be positioned to help shape a number of policies on abortion, has an established track record of supporting pro-abortion laws. She also has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood and reportedly has close ties to George Tiller, the infamous Kansan abortionist who has taken the lives of some 60,000 unborn babies and is now awaiting trial for 19 counts of state law violations for performing illegal abortions on babies capable of living outside the womb. In 2007, Sebelius even held a reception for the abortionist at the governor’s mansion.
These two moves by President Obama hardly seem like a logical approach to help reach his stated goal of reducing the number of abortions. Under his watch, the Department of Health and Human Services is on track to suffer an identity crisis of the worst kind. The agency’s journey down the road of devaluing the unborn and diminishing the right of conscience will undercut its stated commitment to help protect “all Americans.”
HHS would be wise to embrace the full implications of its mission, which should include protecting the unborn. No life is more vulnerable than the unborn. And no person should be forced to play any part in the taking of those lives.
If you agree, please register your concerns with the White House and with your congressman and senators.
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comments
1 On Mar 4th, 2009, at 6:53am, Buck Golden wrote:
If you don’t want to be placed in a position where you have to perform a legal procedure you have gone into the wrong field.
What if people decided that they didn’t want to render care to a person who was of the “wrong” faith or color or who they deemed to be unworthy.
Snap out of it.
2 On Mar 4th, 2009, at 11:55am, Charles Enlow wrote:
I remember hearing or reading something, several years ago, to the effect that the pro-aborts have gotten their hirelings in legislatures and the courts to mandate that government subsidized medical schools require their students to learn abortion techniques as part of the curriculum, without a conscience clause for opting out. I don’t know if the move was successful, but I know a physician, then in training, who was scrubbed to assist a professor in a procedure before finding out it was an abortion. She refused and walked out, but somehow was allowed to complete her medical education. It may have been at Vanderbilt, as her practice was at Franklin…
3 On Mar 11th, 2009, at 9:08pm, James E Reeves wrote:
History records the mistakes and the successes of each generation and God brings judgment on all the apathetic people of a nation that forgets the principles of the successful. This ethical question must be answered quickly by the supreme court and end the freedom from conscience debate by the non-absolute ideology of legal engineering intellectuals.
If man has no need to follow his conscience would that make this world a better place?
James