An affront to women and families
A last-ditch effort to redefine birth control as abortion isn't a matter of conscience; it's just unconscionable
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Oregonian
Michael Leavitt feels misunderstood, or so he hints on his blog. The Bush-appointed secretary of health and human services isn't sure how some people, somehow, got the crazy idea that the government intends to redefine birth control as a form of abortion.
Perhaps the 37 million American women who use contraception -- including more than 400,000 women in Oregon -- could explain it to him. They're quite familiar with federal efforts to turn private medical decisions into matters of public morality, whether getting an abortion, preventing pregnancy after a rape or taking a simple birth control pill.
Under longtime federal law, it is illegal for federally funded clinics and other medical providers to require an employee to provide an abortion if it clashes with his or her personal religious beliefs. That is a reasonable legal protection, as long as the patient can get a swift referral. But the Health and Human Services Department appears eager to dramatically expand that conscience clause, according to draft regulations leaked this summer.
Under the new rules, medical providers would be free to refuse to provide birth control as a matter of conscience. The rules would also define common forms of birth control, including the pill, as abortion. Abortion would be defined to include any drug or procedure "that results in the termination of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation."
In the most simple terms, Leavitt is right. The regulations would indeed protect medical workers who morally object to abortion or contraceptives. But in the real world of politics and health care, the changes would also create a mess.
They would undermine efforts in Oregon and other states to improve access to birth control, including emergency contraception for rape victims. More insidiously, they would assist the anti-abortion campaign to criminalize all abortions by defining legal personhood as the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg, rather than at birth.
"It's a pretty blatant political move," said Cecile Richards, national president of Planned Parenthood, in a recent interview with The Oregonian editorial board. "This is a way of doing, by administrative fiat, what they can't do legislatively."
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists weighed in just as bluntly. "This egregious regulation," its president wrote in protest, "is an affront to health professionals and to American women."
The health secretary blogged late last week that he's not sure yet whether his department will change the rules. He should drop the whole thing. This cynical effort by an exiting administration erodes the public trust and gums up the health care system, while doing nothing for those millions of women and their partners who already rely on a conscience: their own.
This page last updated August 16, 2008 10:53 .