Biden's Catechetical Dementia

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.

The Equality Act would trample on doctors' religious freedom

Published in The Washington Examiner

by Jonathan Imbody  | March 29, 2021

Imagine you are a family physician who entered medical school motivated by the teachings of your faith: to help and bring healing to others.

In medical school, you determined to adhere to the "do no harm" ethical bedrock of the Hippocratic oath: "I will use treatment to help the sick, according to my ability and judgment, but I will never use it to injure or wrong them."

Throughout your medical career, you have treated all your patients with compassion and respect, and you have followed scientific evidence in exercising medical judgment.

But then, one fateful day, the radical federal Equality Act takes effect nationwide.

Not your mother's family planning program

Several federal grants awarded under a recent Title X funding opportunity illustrate the current administration's determination to ensure that faith-based and pro-life clinics, hospitals, pregnancy centers and sexual risk avoidance programs get a fair and legal chance to compete for federal funding.

Drs. David and Janet Kim direct a faith-based health clinic
recently awarded a $2-million Title X family planning grant.

New federal rule protects conscience and opens the door to pro-life family planning programs

Action: Read and send my pre-written message.

Your supportive comments by July 31
can help make sure this proposed rule
is finalized and becomes reality.

If a new proposed federal rule is finalized after a public comment period ending July 31, pro-life medical professionals and programs finally will be able to take advantage of family planning grants opportunities.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a new federal family planning rule to govern federal family planning (Title X) funds. Your supportive comments by July 31 can help make sure this proposed rule is finalized and becomes reality.

Meanwhile, the Christian Medical Association is joining with other national pro-life organizations to prepare training resources that can help you apply for a federal family planning grant (more on that training to come…).

By voicing your support now for this new rule, you also can help protect conscience freedom in healthcare. The new rule removes abortion participation requirements and enforces federal conscience law.

Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar industry that every year
rakes in half a billion tax dollars and
performs nearly a third of a million abortions.

Breaking up the abortion industry's monopoly on federal family planning funds

Abortion is not a stepping stone to workplace equality

Abortion advocates contend that without abortion on demand, which the Supreme Court imposed on all states 40 years ago through Roe v. Wade, "women are unable to participate equally with men in the nation's social, political and economic life." That would be news to the millions of women who have had children while also making impressive and meaningful contributions to society, politics and professional enterprises.

Meanwhile, women who face financial and personal challenges during pregnancy and after giving birth are receiving financial, medical and practical help plus emotional and spiritual support from pregnancy centers around the country, such as those overseen by CareNet and Heartbeat International.

Unlike billion-dollar abortion enterprises like Planned Parenthood that get half a billion in tax dollars a year while performing a million abortions in three years,[i] these pregnancy centers provide compassionate and life-changing services through charitable contributions, devoted staff and volunteers who demonstrate love in action. Women are able to "participate equally with men" as the young fathers learn--through pregnancy centers' education, counseling and mentoring--to share in the responsibility and fulfillment of bringing a new life into the world.

With such safety net resources and a life-affirming perspective, surely we can all--women, men and children--live and thrive together.

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[i] Based on Planned Parenthood’s annual report for fiscal year 2011-2012 showing that the organization has net assets exceeding $1.2 billion, received $542 million in taxpayer funding and performed 333,964 abortions during fiscal year 2011. Their previous annual reports show that the organization performed 329,445 abortions in 2010 and 332,278 abortions in 2009, bringing the total number of abortions in three years to nearly 1 million abortions.

Virginia abortion activists attack pregnancy centers with unconstitutional bill

Imagine that a sporting goods store owner who profits from sales of inhumane bear traps convinces the state legislature to pass a law forcing all anti-bear trap sporting goods stores to post a condemnatory legal notice on their entry doors.

The legal notice informs all potential customers that the store does not sell bear traps, that it is therefore not a "real" sporting goods store, and that it is not a reliable source for sporting information. The new law enables the bear trap seller to establish a virtual monopoly on all sporting goods sales.
Abortion industry lobbyists had in mind a similar scenario when they recently introduced a bill (HB 452 ) that sought to give Planned Parenthood and other abortionists a virtual monopoly on pregnant patients seeking help. The bill required pro-life pregnancy centers to prominently display a notice stating "that the facility is not a health care facility, that it does not perform or refer women for abortions, that it does not provide or refer women for contraception, and that the facility is not required to maintain medical confidentiality or medical records...."
The bill disregarded the reality that qualified medical doctors supervise ultrasound services at pregnancy centers, that performing abortions is hardly the gold standard for defining a health care facility, and that all pro-life pregnancy centers offer strictly confidential counseling regardless of legal requirements.
The bill also opened the door to withering attacks on its constitutionality by attorneys such as Denise Burke of Americans United for Life (AUL). Ms. Burke testified in both Virginia House and Senate that the vaguely worded bill violated constitutional due process by making pregnancy centers unconstitutionally vulnerable to capricious enforcement and unpredictable penalties.

Thankfully, a coalition of AUL, the Family Foundation, Care Net, and Heartbeat International managed to blunt the attack with sound reasoning and evidence, and bill was recently withdrawn.
Pregnancy centers can prepare for the inevitable future attacks by (a) forming ad hoc state coalitions to engage with legislators and (b) banding together with national pregnancy center associations such as CareNet and Heartbeat International. These organizations help maintain professional standards, track political developments and provide ongoing education to members.