Obama administration wants to eliminate conscience rights for health care provider to advance abortion

The Obama administration wants to eliminate conscience rights for health care providers. You can help prevent this from happening, but you must act immediately. Health and Human Services (HHS) is accepting public comments on this during a 30 day period which ends on April 9, 2009. Time is ticking. Go to www.freedom2care.org and send a message today. (Please remember to remove the names and addresses of others when forwarding this email).

In the past, Congress has passed laws, with bipartisan support, confirming the freedom of conscience of health care providers. More recently these laws were grouped together in HHS regulations which were adopted in Dec. 2008 by the Bush administration.

The one thing that the regulations added: "teeth." Enforceability. If a medical school tries to coerce a medical student to act against his or her conscience, that school can't receive federal funds.

For example, if a student is told he or she must participate in an abortion in order to pass a course--if that student's conscience prevents the student from performing an abortion or assisting with an abortion in order to pass a class or to graduate, currently the student must be excused. That student cannot be failed or prevented from graduating on that basis. If the school did prevent the student from graduating on that basis, they would not be eligible for federal dollars. Surprisingly, these types of situations do arise at medical schools.

But doctors and nurses in practice are also subject to similar types of pressures more often than you might expect. The reason the regulations came about in 2008 was that they were needed, and many health care providers had written to say the regulations were needed, during a lengthy period of public comment.

Now, these regulations are about to be overturned. To read about this issue, and to make your voice heard, go to www.freedom2care.org and look in the left hand side bar. Click to send a message to HHS, then click to respond either as a patient or as a provider, also in the upper left corner. Then you will be given a choice of a pre-written message, or the opportunity to write your own and have it sent to HHS. But act quickly because time is running out. April 9, 2009 is the deadline. Please send a message yourself, and ask others to do the same.