HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas

The Greatest Health Scourge: Religious Persecution

List the top three health menaces. Opioid addiction? The courts are seeing suits against pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, and prescribing physicians. Obesity? Even as our collective girth mounts, the statistics on the consequences, from diabetes to pre-term babies, mounts. What about alcohol addiction? That surfaces in crime, domestic violence, automobile accidents, as well as in damaged livers. Maybe we should put gun-violence on top, though we don’t allow a national governmental agency to compile those statistics. More candidates? Maybe the growing census of people without health insurance. Mental illness besets millions. As a nation, we can throw darts at many targets.

This Administration, though, has elevated “Religious Persecution” to the top of its concerns. The newly minted Office of Conscience and Religious Freedom, plunked into the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights, demands attention: presumably, Americans are suffering, based on their religious beliefs. Historically, the Office of Civil Rights has helped non-English speaking patients gain translators in hospitals; it has helped disabled people in community settings; it has helped people whose privacy was breached (a guarantee under HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). Now the Office protects people who must abandon their religious principles to keep their jobs.

The Office of Conscience and Religious Freedom evokes Orwell, as though a malicious Big Brother is forcing us into lock-step uniformity, heedless of our objections. But we don’t force baptism onto moribund newborns. We don’t make parents vaccinate their children: we allow “religious exemptions.” When schools teach comprehensive sex-education, we let parents opt out.

And we do not force physicians or hospital staff to do abortions. The barely-veiled explanation for this new Office is of course abortions. The implication is that we are forcing hospitals, clinics, physicians, and the attendant staff, from nurses to ultrasonographers, to participate in abortions (as well as sterilizations, assisted suicide, euthanasia, gender-surgery. Proponents, as well as opponents of this new Office, are marshalling the possible details). The Administration paints this Office as a heroic Knight, bent on saving those employees coerced into violating their consciences. At last, no employees will be forced to contribute, however marginally, to abortions; nor can hospitals or clinics fire those conscientious objectors. Thanks to this Office.

But this Office is a flim flam public relations salvo.

We already have a slew of “conscience” protections, beginning with Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, but did not force practitioners to “violate personally-held moral beliefs.” The Church Amendments (1983) bar federally funded programs from discriminating against hospitals that refuse to participate in abortion and sterilization. Furthermore, the Amendments forbid hospitals that receive federal funds from discriminating against staff who refuse to participate in abortions. The Welden Amendment, included in Congressional appropriations regularly since 2005, allows federal funds to go to “entities” (including physicians) that refuse to participate in abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, as well as those that refuse to participate in post-graduate training that includes those procedures. The Public Health Care Act of 1996 (S245) allows federal funds to go to entities that don’t do abortions. Most recently, the Affordable Care Act allows for “conscience” objections. (www.hhs.gov/conscience/conscience-protections/index.html)

Instead of challenging the legality of abortion, or convincing women not to have them (which might entail raising the housing, food and welfare subsidies for poor women, increasing funds for daycare, improving center-city schools, guaranteeing healthcare), foes have campaigned, successfully, to deny access, through state laws that require waiting periods, ultrasounds, counseling, and parental consent. We have restricted insurance coverage, making it clear that the collective pool, whether governmental or private, does not want to pay for this procedure.

The Office of Conscience and Religious Freedom adds a rhetorical flourish to the campaign. The suggestion is clear: under the banner of “conscience,” Uncle Sam will now protect the rights of people who refuse to do abortions, even though Uncle Sam has long offered those protections.

The more salient question: Who safeguards the rights of women seeking abortions? And, as a corollary, if a cadre of “pro-lifers” make abortion almost impossible to have (those state legislative blockades are powerful – they now include protection for fetuses with genetic anomalies), what Office – and whose conscience - will assure those newborns healthcare, education, housing, food, and love?

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018

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