HHS: Doctors can refuse abortions
Proposed rule cites religious, moral objections
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration announced plans yesterday to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs.
The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices, and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral, or religious grounds.
"People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "Healthcare workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their violates their own conscience."
The proposed regulation, which could go into effect after a 30-day comment period, was welcomed by conservative groups, abortion opponents, and others as necessary to safeguard workers from being fired or penalized.
Women's health advocates, family planning advocates, abortion-rights activists, and others, however, condemned the regulation, saying it could create sweeping obstacles to a variety of health services, including abortion, family planning, end-of-life care, and possibly a wide range of scientific research.
"It's breathtaking," said Robyn Shapiro, a bioethicist at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "The impact could be enormous."
The regulation drops the most controversial language in a draft version that would have explicitly defined an abortion for the first time in a federal law or regulation as anything that interfered with a fertilized egg after conception. But both supporters and critics said the regulation remained broad enough to protect pharmacists, doctors, nurses, and others from providing birth control pills, Plan B emergency contraception, and other forms of contraception, and explicitly allows workers to withhold information and refuse to refer patients elsewhere.
"The Bush administration's proposed regulation poses a serious threat to women's healthcare by limiting the rights of patients to receive complete and accurate health information and services," said Cecile Richards of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Women's ability to manage their own healthcare is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology."
Leavitt said he requested the new regulation after becoming alarmed by reports that healthcare workers were being pressured to perform duties they found repugnant. He cited moves by two professional organizations for obstetricians and gynecologists that he said might require doctors who object to abortions to refer patients to physicians who would.
A draft of the regulation that leaked in July triggered a flood of criticism from women's health activists, family planning advocates, members of Congress, and others. Concern focused on fears the definition of abortion could be interpreted to include many forms of widely used contraception. 