Law Professor Alvaré makes the case for conscience rights, Protect Life Act

Prof. Alvaré

Law professor Helen Alvaré provides a well-reasoned rationale for the Protect Life Act, H.R. 358, in her column, "Bills Needed to Repel Obama’s Attack on Pro-Life Conscience."
Prof. Alvaré observes,

There is no need to view the matter of conscience protection in health care as a zero-sum game between conscience-driven healthcare providers and the patients they serve, particularly the most vulnerable. Opponents of conscience protection often portray the situation this way, but the opposite is true.

She offers four key points:

1. Less privileged women are less likely to support abortion or abortion funding than are more privileged women, or than men.
2. Abortion has not mainstreamed into the American healthcare system. It remains rather, in the words of the New York Times, at the “margins of medical practice.”
3. There is an emerging scientific and cultural willingness to conclude that abortion is a form of killing, and not health care for women.
4. There is evidence from a growing body of sociological as well as law and economics literature that more easily available abortion is associated with women’s “immiseration,” and not their flourishing.

Prof. Alvaré concludes,

The Protect Life Act is a both a necessary and a wise amendment to the Affordable Care Act. It helps preserve within our nation’s health care delivery system the valuable contributions made by conscience-driven providers and institutions to the needs of the most vulnerable women and men. It indicates that abortion has not attained the status of a “standard” of health care, a message which might well help begin to reverse the negative role played by legalized abortion in the lives of American women, particularly the most vulnerable women. And it preserves in American law and culture the bedrock value of respect for religious and moral conscience.

Prof. Alvaré also testified before Congress on the Protect Life Act.
Action:
Click here to locate your Representative's web page, then use the Contact form on that page to send an email or place a phone call.
Sample email or phone message to your Representative:
Please vote YES on the Protect Life Act, H.R. 358 to prevent federal funding for abortion and to provide conscience protections for healthcare professionals and institutions.