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(Image: Source Zimbio.
Photo by None/Getty Images North America. Taken at a a live taping of
Meet the Press at NBC Studios July 13, 2008 in Washington, DC. Even
Carly Fiorina, a top McCain surrogate, called birth control a choice.)
In other women's rights trampling, the Bush Administration is doing
the quick step to achieve as many of its oppressive agenda points as
possible before the President's term ends. This week's big move?
Removing the blockade and letting anti-choice activists storm the
health care castle in order to not only block women from getting
abortions that are, for the record, still legal, but also could
classify contraception products as abortions and enable "objectors" to
prevent women from accessing those too.
They call it "preventing discrimination" in hiring on the basis of
"religious belief" but it's clear---after reading all 39 pages of the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed rule
document---what it really is: trying to cut the legs out from under Roe
v. Wade.
What does the document say? (Click here to read the complete PDF, provided courtesy of RH Reality Check.)
The document states that the government has always provided measures
to protect conscientious objectors, whether the objection is
religiously or philosophically based:
protecting individuals’ consciences in health service
programs and research activities funded by the federal government; and
protecting the rights of all health care entities, individual or
institutional, from being forced to participate in certain activities.
Workers in all sectors of the economy enjoy legal protection of their
consciences and religious liberties. In the health care industry, there
are several statutory provisions that specifically address individuals’
religious and conscience rights. These federal statutes prohibit
recipients of certain federal funds from coercing individuals into
participating in actions they find religiously or morally
objectionable. These same provisions also prohibit discrimination on
the basis of one’s objection to or participation in specific
procedures, including abortion or sterilization, or one’s participation
in or refusal to participate in abortion or sterilization procedures.
More recently, statutory provisions and appropriations riders have been
enacted that prohibit federal programs and State and local governments
from discriminating against individuals and institutions that refuse
to, among other things, provide, refer for, pay for, or cover,
abortion. (p.2)
In addition to this, the document proposes to re-define both
pregnancy and abortion, and this is where it gets very sticky. The
document asserts that there are various beliefs about when pregnancy
occurs, and therefore allows each individual health care professional
to decide---based on his or her conscience and personal beliefs about
when life begins---whether to provide the health service a woman wants.
To quote:
Therefore, for the purpose of these proposed
regulations, and implementing and enforcing the Church Amendment,
Public Health Service Act §245, and the Weldon Amendment, the
Department proposes to define abortion as “any of the various
procedures—including the prescription and administration of any drug or
the performance of any procedure or any other action—that results in
the termination of the life of a human being in utero between
conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”
Unfortunately, this is no joke. This is creating health care chaos,
and putting a health care practitioners personal preference above two
of the basic keystones of medical care:
- Never to do deliberate harm to anyone for anyone else's interest.
- To keep the good of the patient as the highest priority.
That's from the Hippocratic oath.
Because of the broad and unscientific---not to mention inconsistent
and inconsistently applied---proposed new definition in this document
of when a woman could be considered pregnant, nearly any contraception
could be considered abortion and a conscientious objector could decide
to prohibit a woman from receiving it.
As Cristina at RH Reality Check writes
Up until now, the federal government followed the
definition of pregnancy accepted by the American Medical Association
and our nation's pregnancy experts, the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is: pregnancy begins at
implantation. With this proposal, however, HHS is dismissing medical
experts and opting instead to accept a definition of pregnancy based on
polling data. It now claims that pregnancy begins at some biologically
unknowable moment (there's no test to determine if a woman's egg has
been fertilized). Under these new standards there would be no way for a
woman to prove she's not pregnant. Thus, any woman could be denied
contraception under HHS' new science.
In a New York Times article, leaders in women's health care question the motive behind these proposed new rules:
Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family
Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents
providers, said, “The proposed definition of abortion is so broad that
it would cover many types of birth control, including oral
contraceptives and emergency contraception.”“We worry that under the proposal, contraceptive services would
become less available to low-income and uninsured
