Religion & Law

Dahlia Lithwick is not pleased with the Bush Administration's new rules protecting the conscience-rights -- or, as our leading news outlets insist on putting it, conscience-rights -- of health-care workers.  In her view, this solicitude is inconsistent with a South Dakota law that requires law requires abortion-providers to tell women, before performing an abortion, that they are about to terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being with whom she has an existing relationship.  (I've blogged about the South Dakota law here.)  She says, [r]eading the new HHS regulations together with the mandatory South Dakota 'script,' one can only conclude that those same health providers who cannot be compelled to perform an abortion may nevertheless be compelled to deliver misinformation about it. 

I agree that no one ought to be required to deliver misinformation.  The question, I suppose, is whether there is a truth to the matter whether an unborn child is a whole, separate, unique, living human being.

Emily Bazelon, who has also written often about this and similar disputes, contends, at slate.com, that we should refrain from calling this 'the conscience rule,' as the administration urges. It's really a rule about why your conscience is better than my conscience.  This is not convincing.  The conscience of a person seeking an abortion, or Plan B, or some other procedure or product is not burdened by the refusal of a particular person to provide it.  (This is not to say that such a refusal might not cause inconvenience and even hardship.  But, that is not the same thing.)  

My own impression is that many in the press -- specifically, those who insist on putting scare quotes around conscience (when they surely would not do so in a story involving, say, a placard-making company that did not want to provide anti-gay hate-signs to Fred Phelps) -- simply do not concede that conscience could ever lead one to conclude that one ought not to cooperate in the provision of a particular product or that, if it ever does, it is, to that extent, not worthy of protection.

There are, of course, arguments that can be made, and that should be taken seriously, against regulations like the ones promulgated by the Administration.  (See the many posts by Rob Vischer on this and similar issues.)  But the constant scare quotes are a cheap shot, and Bazelon's more important than argument strikes me as weak.