Edited and published in The Federalist, April 27, 2022. Original version is below:
How the administration's abortion ideology-driven assault on faith and
conscience threatens care for millions of needy individuals
By Jonathan Imbody[i]
The year is 2024, and the Biden administration's assault on
conscience freedoms has taken a tragic toll on the healthcare landscape.
Since the 2022 elimination
of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) conscience protections
for health professionals, government-sanctioned discrimination has driven out of
medicine persons of faith and pro-life convictions, accelerating and
exacerbating the long-predicted
physician shortage crisis. The shortage leaves millions of patients, especially
the poor and marginalized, without the faith-based care on which they had
depended.
From medical students to doctors to hospitals and clinics, no one
who hews to Hippocratic or Judeo-Christian ethics can survive the
administration's ideological purge of healthcare.
Three examples illustrate the individual, institutional and national impact:
·
A summa cum laude college graduate
interviews at countless medical schools but cannot find one that will tolerate
her Christian faith. Woke academic institutions blatantly discriminate, having
taken their cues from the elimination of the HHS conscience rule and the ceasing
of prosecutions
of conscience law violators. Christians and pro-lifers need not apply.
·
A faith-based, pro-life clinic faces a financial
crisis as it desperately tries to continue its charitable mission of caring for
thousands of low-income patients in the community without the federal Title X
funds that had helped them care for pregnant women and teens and their families.
The Biden HHS Title X rule requires grantees to make referrals for abortions--a
conscience-trampling rule that effectively bars pro-life clinics from the
program.
·
Nationwide, a raft of federal agency rules enforce
the administration's intolerance for and discrimination against all those who
do not kowtow to leftist ideology. Mandating ideological submission on matters
of the sanctity of human life, sexuality and marriage, the regulations slam the
door on federal aid for thousands of pro-life hospitals and clinics as well as highly
effective faith-based social programs for adoption and foster care, food and
clothing distribution, mental health services, ex-offender programs, drug and
alcohol rehabilitation, marriage and family counseling and teen pregnancy
prevention programs. Millions of individuals served by these programs suffer as
a result.
This peek into a conscience-trampling future is actually a
glimpse of the past and the present.
The above account of medical school discrimination comes from a
young woman who details her experience in an email:
"I was top of my class (summa cum laude) as an undergrad at UC
Berkeley, had an MCAT score above the average of all the medical schools I
applied to, and I had participated in many extracurriculars including being on
the leadership team of my church and campus ministry group. I think I applied
to essentially all of the medical schools in my home state of California. I did
not get even a single interview--except for the faith-based school of Loma
Linda. I knew that declaring my faith in my application would likely not be
seen favorably by many. I guess I didn't expect it to be everyone."
A national scientific survey
of faith-based health professionals that I constructed with then-pollster
Kellyanne Conway in 2009, replicated in 2019, found that widespread discrimination
begins in medical school and continues throughout an individual's career. Three
in five faith-based medical professionals agreed with the poll statement that
it is common that "doctors, medical students or other healthcare
professionals face discrimination for declining to participate in activities or
provide medical procedures to which they have moral or religious
objections."
The above account of a clinic that lost federal Title X family
planning funds relates to the Biden administration's scheme, announced
in April 2021, that reverses a Trump administration statute-driven policy and
instead requires
grantees to make abortion referrals: "Each project supported under this
part must … offer pregnant clients the opportunity to be provided information
and counseling regarding… pregnancy termination."
The abortion referral requirement impacts pro-life clinics such
as Staten Island, New York's Beacon Christian Community Health Center. The
ministry "provides quality, affordable healthcare" for the
community's poor and pledges to "uphold and promote the value and
sacredness of each individual human life from conception to death." Beacon
won an award under the Trump rule but no longer receives Title X funds to aid
its low-income patients. The Biden administration now effectively reserves those
funds for its abortion business political supporters, turning Title X into a
marketing mechanism that leads patients to abortion clinics.
As Valerie Huber, Trump's acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for
the Office of Population Affairs that oversees the Title X program, told me,
"Requiring abortion referral turns a Title X clinic into a location where
abortion is treated as a method of family planning. This is clearly against the
spirit and the letter of the statute."
The above account of a nationwide regulatory agenda of
intolerance reflects the Biden administration's multiple federal agency mandates
designed to force compliance with leftist ideological stances and eliminate conscientious
objectors.
As The Federalist has documented,
the Biden HHS already has torn down the Conscience and Religious Freedom
Division, stripped the HHS Office of Civil Rights' authority to enforce
conscience and religious projections under the Religious Freedom Restoration
Act and the First Amendment, dismissed a case of forced abortion participation,
assured
abortionists that "we have your back" and rescinded conscience
waivers that had allowed federal grants to faith-based adoption and foster care
agencies.
The Biden administration now is churning out more rules
that aggressively enforce its ideology on issues including abortion; religious
exemptions; insurance coverage of contraceptives and abortifacients;
sterilization; gender identity interventions; gender identity issues in sports,
bathrooms and locker rooms; compelled speech; and Title IX sexual harassment
due process protections.
At the top of the administration's list of ideological mandates
is abortion, an issue on which self-described
"good Catholic" Joe Biden apparently suffers from catechetical
dementia.
In 2006, Biden proudly proclaimed,
“I do not vote for funding for abortion." But in his 2019 presidential run,
he dropped
his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment that prohibits most government
funding for abortion. His administration's blitzkrieg of rules now are embedding
abortion ideology in government policy while essentially eliminating funding
for abortion opponents.
The administration's anti-religion ideological purge threatens to
create what Richard John Neuhaus warned
of in 1984--a naked public square, a government devoid of religious participation,
values and moral influence.
In particular, excluding the faith community from health care
bodes severe consequences.
Both our 2009 and 2019 aforementioned national surveys of
faith-based health professionals revealed that 91% of respondents said they
either strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement, "I would rather
stop practicing medicine altogether than be forced to violate my conscience."
They cannot separate their faith-motivated mission to care for the poor from
their faith commitment to honor the sanctity of human life.
Left unchecked, by 2024, Biden administration policies may well
succeed in driving the pro-life and faith communities out of partnerships with
the federal government. The victims of the resulting naked public square will
be millions of patients, the poor and other needy and suffering individuals served
by faith-based health and social services programs.
Biden unwittingly pronounced
his own judgment when he condemned Vladimir Putin for using the power of
government to force the Ukrainian people to violate their values and submit to
his profane ideology.
"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."
[i] Jonathan
Imbody is a writer and consultant with FaithSteps.net and has several decades
of experience in federal healthcare and religious freedom public policy.
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