Obama Can’t Say He’s Pro-Choice by Dropping Protections for Pro-Life Doctors
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
March 8, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — President Barack Obama’s apparent decision to drop the protections the Bush administration put in place to protect doctors means he can no longer say he is pro-choice on abortion. That’s the assessment of respected pro-life attorney Matt Bowman of the Alliance Defense Fund.
As LifeNews.com has reported, Obama has taken the next step to remove the new protections the Bush administration put in place to protect pro-life medical centers and staff who do not want to do abortions.
The protections provided better enforcement for existing conscience laws for medical professionals.
"By his rule issued today, President Obama is utterly refusing to enforce these conscience protection laws, resulting in a situation where doctors may be forced to participate in abortions and patients may be forced to have their babies delivered by doctors who perform abortions," Bowman explains.
"Whatever happened to the so called ‘right to choose?’" he asks. "The Obama administration is quite simply collaborating with Planned Parenthood and their allies to allow pro-life medical professionals to be punished for their beliefs, with the punishment to be funded by your federal dollars."
Bowman says early media reports quoted Obama administration saying the president would merely "narrowly tailor the regulations or better define them."
Instead, the comments the administration will publish in the Federal Register make it clear Obama will rescind the rule entirely.
"He will ‘rescind in its entirety’ the current regulation, leaving no federal regulation at all protecting doctors, even from being forced to participate in such things as late-term abortion,’ Bowman told LifeNews.com, quoting from the Obama proposal.
Bowman calls Obama’s decision a failure to uphold existing laws that are supposed to provide protection for medical centers and staff but are being routinely flouted.
"The current implementing regulation does nothing more than take laws that have been on the books for three decades, and actually enforce their words so that federal fund recipients cannot illegally discriminate against pro-life health care workers," Bowman says.
"The implementing regulations in no way expand those time-honored laws—they simply enforce them, so that the will of the American people would actually be applied to protect doctors from being forced to participate in abortions or face dire consequences," he says.
The Obama administration, in its proposal, seeks comments from the public, but the email address it has given ([email protected]) is not working.
Bowman responds to the problem and advises pro-life people looking to respond to be diligent.
"The HHS email address seems to be malfunctioning. The error is HHS’s fault, and is hindering the ability of citizens to submit comments," he says. "If your email bounces, try it again early next week."
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