Resisting Intolerant Consciences'
Affirming Women's Civil Rights' to a Decisive-Bodily-Autonomy
“Invoking ‘conscience’ does not make it right.”1
I discovered this particular item today as I was going through the more than sixty different webpages I have bookmarked for my next upcoming essay, that will be focused on a line of thought I am pursuing with which to coalesce what appears to be a thread that runs though the Project 2025’s plan-book Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative Promise via which Christian nationalism aligned parties and individuals will work towards to accomplish their goals and end objective of establishing a Theocratic-Aristocratic—Epistocratic Paternalism2, by which to govern America with a modernized version of the Founding Fathers era New England styled Covenant Theology3.
As much as I want to get into the actual writing of my next essay, this one most definitely requires some deep-thinking and careful work when it comes to arranging the final choices of source material within my nascent theory of the thread that binds Project 2025 to the administration of the Federal Government for the purposes of Christian nationalism.
So then this particular edition today of your newsletter is for me the equivalent of a flag drop to indicate that a civil rights march has begun.
The following quotes are derived from a single webpage that contains a short briefing/essay located at The Hastings Center which is a foundation that “addresses social and ethical issues in health care, science, and technology.”
“Conscientious objection in health care is the refusal of a health care professional to provide or participate in the delivery of a legal, medically appropriate health care service to a patient because of personal beliefs.”
“Conscientious objection in health care always affects someone else’s health or access to care because the refusal interrupts the delivery of health services. Therefore, conscientious objection in health care always has a social dimension and cannot be framed solely as an issue of individual rights or beliefs. Parents’ decisions not to vaccinate their children for a particular disease can increase the risk of that disease not only for their own children but also for others in their community. At what point does refusal to consent to treatment constitute medical neglect? At what point does a clinician’s moral objection to providing a treatment interfere with a patient’s access to treatment, and violate professional ethical standards? Laws and professional guidelines on conscientious objection in health care must balance the respect for an individual’s beliefs against the well-being of the general public.”
“Invoking ‘conscience’ does not make it right.”
Nancy Berlinger, PhD, research scholar at The Hastings Center.
The above quoted essay can be accessed via the following link:
Conscience Clauses, Health Care Providers, and Parents
It is a short piece of writing and well worth reading.
For some additional perspective below is a quote from the Mandate for Leadership, found on page 450 in the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services written by Roger Serverino who “is Vice President of Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation.” and who “As director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2017 to 2021, he led a team of more than 250 staff enforcing civil rights, conscience, and health information privacy laws.” [Emphasis added RJR] (Page xxi)4
Goal #1: Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity. The Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.
A robust respect for the sacred rights of conscience, both at HHS and among governments and institutions funded by it, increases choices for patients and program beneficiaries and furthers pluralism and tolerance. The Secretary must protect Americans’ civil rights by ensuring that HHS programs and activities follow the letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience-protection laws. (Page 450)5
Below is a synoptic from the REEDSMITH law firm of some recent changes to laws focused on conscience rights and provides a brief survey of the past four White House Administration and the battle over this important area:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a final rule today governing federal protections for health care workers exercising their right to nondiscrimination on the basis of conscience objections.
The rule, entitled, Safeguarding the Rights of Conscience as Protected by Federal Statutes, is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday, January 11 and will take effect on March 11, 2024. The rule effectively repeals the majority of a Trump-era rule that was blocked by federal court orders before it even went into effect.
The new rule reinstates provisions of an Obama-era rule that placed the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the HHS office that handles nondiscrimination enforcement, in charge of coordinating complaints for violations of the conscience protections of various federal laws. The rule also implements a voluntary notice provision that establishes an industry best practice to alert employees to their rights under the laws.
Abortion Rights and Gender-Affirming Care at issue
At the root of a lot of the back and forth for these rules across the last 15 years has been the balance that OCR has been charged with making sure that patients aren’t denied access to necessary medical procedures while at the same time protecting the rights of providers with sincerely held conscience objections.6
And of course the Heritage Foundation had taken issue with the proposed rule changes early last year (2023) as can be seen below:
In the absence of more robust policies at HHS to protect conscience rights, someone’s only recourse was to file a complaint with the HHS Office for Civil Rights if he or she believed he or she had been discriminated against. Unfortunately, that office had a poor track record of moving quickly—if at all—on such complaints.
That status quo was unacceptable. In 2018, the Trump administration established a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within HHS’ Office for Civil Rights dedicated to protecting those important rights. In 2019, it also finalized a rule providing the new division with more ways to enforce conscience-protection laws.7
As can be seen in the above quote the matter of “discrimination” and the “HHS Office for Civil Rights” apparently present problems for conservative adherents; this aspect plays strongly into my theory that I am developing, and will appear again frequently.
And The Federalist Society, was not exactly thrilled with the resultant changes viewing them as step towards leftism:
Pro-abortion and pro-LGBT groups applauded HHS’s final rule. The Human Rights Campaign praised HHS’s balancing approach, which it said “ensure[s] patients have access to essential care, regardless of the provider’s beliefs.” Planned Parenthood likewise claims the rule affirms that “No one should be denied health care.” According to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the final rule “is premised on the recognition that a proper balance must be struck between respecting conscience and ensuring that people get the health care they need.”8
I do not want to get ahead of myself so I will stop here for now.
If you learned anything new or of interest to you or if you think someone you know whether it be an individual or a larger audience might benefit from reading my writings, then please take the time to cross-post, restack, or share this essay or any of my other writings. The more people know about what is happening with our Democracy the better are our chances of defending our freedoms and civil rights against the scourge and destitution of the MAGA-Republican movement and its defacto dictator convict-Trump.
Thank you for reading.
Robert J. Rei, Fall River, MA, July 15, 2024
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley
Conscience Clauses, Health Care Providers, and Parents, Nancy Berlinger, June 30, 2023, The Hastings Center, https://www.thehastingscenter.org/briefingbook/conscience-clauses-health-care-providers-and-parents/
Political Epistemology, “Chapter 6 Epistocratic Paternalism”, David Estlund, May 2021, Oxford Academic, Pages 97-113, https://academic.oup.com/book/39301/chapter-abstract/338891107, Digital Object Identifier <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192893338.003.0007>
Abstract
Epistocracy—roughly, political rule by the wise—is similar to paternalism. In both cases, knowing better is not enough to justify taking charge. But also in both cases, the prohibition is unlikely to be absolute. If one person’s competence is low enough, and the other person would do enough better by taking over, then (simplifying) it is plausibly justified. Arguably it is partly on such grounds that children may be governed by others in ways that adults may not be. May political subjects likewise be ruled by those who know enough better? A right to collective self-rule is not enough by itself to answer this, any more than a right to individual self-rule tells us whether and when the competence disparity is enough to justify paternalism. This rough analogy exposes important issues in the project of defending a requirement of democracy as against epistocracy.
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic: Religion and the Congress of the Confederation, Library of Congress, undated, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel04.html
Congress was guided by "covenant theology," a Reformation doctrine especially dear to New England Puritans, which held that God bound himself in an agreement with a nation and its people. This agreement stipulated that they "should be prosperous or afflicted, according as their general Obedience or Disobedience thereto appears." Wars and revolutions were, accordingly, considered afflictions, as divine punishments for sin, from which a nation could rescue itself by repentance and reformation.
The first national government of the United States, was convinced that the "public prosperity" of a society depended on the vitality of its religion. Nothing less than a "spirit of universal reformation among all ranks and degrees of our citizens," Congress declared to the American people, would "make us a holy, that so we may be a happy people."
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, chapter 14, “Health and Human Services”, Roger Severino, The Heritage Foundation, https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
Ibidem
HHS Repeals Most of 2019 Health Care Conscience Protection Rule, Matthew Loughran, January 9, 2024, REEDSMITH, https://www.healthindustrywashingtonwatch.com/2024/01/articles/regulatory-developments/hhs-developments/office-for-civil-rights-hhs-developments/hhs-repeals-most-of-2019-health-care-conscience-protection-rule/
Biden Seeks to Strip Health Care Professionals of Conscience Protections, Melanie Israel, May 2, 2023, The Heritage Foundation, https://www.heritage.org/civil-rights/commentary/biden-seeks-strip-health-care-professionals-conscience-protections
HHS Issues Final Rule on Conscience Rights in Healthcare, Rachel N. Morrison, Eric N. Kniffin< January 31, 2024, The Federalist Society, https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/hhs-issues-final-rule-on-conscience-rights-in-healthcare