Conscience and Religious Freedom

by Groff Schroeder

Most Americans probably think that our medical and religious decisions – especially with regard to sex and reproduction – are deeply private, and that the only people who can legally make these decisions for us are ourselves, our families, and our physicians. Others think US law should force everyone to obey the mandates of [insert religion name here] beliefs – especially with regard to sex and reproduction – no matter what anyone else's [insert religion name here] beliefs (if any) may be. Unfortunately, corporations, employers, governmental agencies, organizations, religious institutions, and individuals already appear to leverage various forms of societal power to force the directives of their church onto their patients.

Want to fill a prescription for birth control pills for your daughter's debilitating menstrual cramps? Any pharmacist in the US can claim a "moral or religious objection" to birth control to discriminate against your daughter by refusing to fill her prescription, overruling both your and her physician's medical decisions. Need emergency abortion because your pregnancy is dead and you face imminent death from hemorrhage or sepsis? The United States has the worst maternal death rate in the developed world, yet hospitals who forbid birth control and abortion (about one in six) cite church "ethical and religious directives" to deny a range of reproductive medical care to pregnant women and families – often in the absence of lesser accreditation, informed consent, or payment forgiveness.

President Trump recently announced a new "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within the Housing and Human Services Office of Civil Rights to "guarantee justice to victims of religious discrimination." Sadly, the new "civil rights" division will not protect patients from being forced to comply with the religious dictates of their medical providers or require obvious identification of hospitals that deny reproductive medical care. Instead, even though numerous "reasonable accommodations" already exist, the division will protect medical providers in paid positions of professional responsibility who claim THEY are "discriminated against" when experiencing negative consequences because they refused to do their job, denied their patients medical care, and forced their personal religious beliefs upon their patients. Specifically, the administration claims that "free exercise of religion" creates nebulous "conscience rights" that allow medical providers (and donor-class corporate-politico-religious corporations) to cite "moral or religious objections" to deny their patients' any medication, procedure, product, or service they oppose (ostensibly including blood transfusion etc.).

Any person or entity denying services to (discriminating against) anyone for religious reasons appears to violate not only numerous founding ideals of the United States Constitution (freedom of religion, due process, privacy, equality under the law, etc.), but also numerous legal, medical, professional, and religious ethics, morals, and precedents. It is patently absurd to claim that "free exercise of religion" exists when powerful medical providers and entities can force ill or injured, paying patients to surrender their personal religious practices to comply with the religious directives of the undamaged, paid provider's church. The creation by the United States of a "civil rights" division to protect apparent egregious violations of the Constitution, the law, and medical professionalism is disturbing commentary on the freedom-corroding power of "campaign donations" and profit-driven medicine, the sorry state of American freedom and separation of church and state, and the apparent collapse of reciprocity, integrity, logic, and morality in the politically active religious institutions supporting such an asymmetric and oxymoronic interpretation of "free exercise of religion."

Published in the February 6-13 2018 edition of the Colorado Springs Independent with the quotation below.

"There is but one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life - reciprocity."

Confucius