FROM THE PROGRESSIVE POINT OF VIEW

A Grave Infringement on the Right to Choose, and Ridiculous Meddling into the Practice of Medicine

The new Bush reg on abortion just came out, and it’s astonishingly sweeping.

The regulation would give the President the power to yank funding from “more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, and doctors’ offices . . . if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral, or religious grounds,” the Washington Post reports.

So say a young woman has been raped and she comes in either for emergency contraception, or eight or twelve weeks later an abortion.

Any health care employee can refuse to help that woman, and can even refuse to offer her a referral. If the hospital or clinic tried to fire that employee for not assisting a patient in need, they’d lose federal funding.

This is a ridiculous infringement of a woman’s right to choose, and it’s ridiculous meddling into the practice of medicine.

How are you supposed to run a hospital when any employee can refuse to participate in medical procedures?

One person may be opposed to tubal ligations, another to vasectomies, a third to circumcisions, and yet another to infant inoculations.

What are you to do? Have two sets of employees—one team that’ll do everything and another that picks and chooses?

How ’bout something simpler?

Like the idea that if you’re in the health care business, your job is to give the patient get the best and safest treatment possible, as defined by prevailing medical standards.

Not as you, or George Bush, define it.