WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration took a first step on Friday to rescind a controversial Bush-mandated regulation allowing healthcare professionals to refuse to provide services and information on moral grounds.
An official at the Department of Health and Human Services said the Bush administration rule had "upset the balance" between allowing doctors to decline to provide abortions and protecting the rights of women to get the care they need.
Current law includes a conscience clause for providers who do not want to perform abortions, but the Bush administration rule that took effect January 20 went much further, the agency official said on condition of anonymity.
It was vague enough to let health professionals invoke the conscience clause for things like contraceptives, family planning and counseling for vaccines and blood transfusions, she said.
"We recognize and understand that some providers have objections to providing abortions. We want to ensure that current law protects them," the official said.
"But we do not want to impose new limitations on services ... like family planning and contraception that would actually help prevent the need for an abortion in the first place."
. . . "Today's action by the Obama administration demonstrates that this president is not going to stand by and let women's health be placed in jeopardy," said Cecile Richards, head of the Planned Parenthood Federation.
Mary Jane Gallagher, head of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, called it an "important start."
"Women and men who depend on these services cannot afford for their access to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health screenings to be limited by this extreme rule," she said.
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The next time an advocate of same-sex "marriage" (or pseudogamy as a friend of mine calls it) tells you that they just want to right to marry and would oppose requiring a church or individual clergy member from performing such a ceremony, remember this effort to rescind the conscience clause. 45 years ago, which Connecticut still outlawed contraceptives, opponents of that ban declared that all they wanted was the right to use contraceptives and did not want any health care provider to be required to prescribe or dispense them. The same was true 37 years ago when proponents of abortion sought to overturn that ban. Yet a generation later, that is, a later generation, is now seeking to do exactly that. Expect the same to occur regarding churches and clergy who refuse to perform same-sex "marriages" a generation after the proponent of same-sex "marriage" get their "live-and-let-live" agenda adopted.
Humans cannot long tolerate a "live-and-let-live" solution for issues which they consider to involve fundamental human rights. The "progression" is always from banned to permitted to mandated or visa versa.
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