Religious freedom for pro-life medical workers increasingly has become a target of abortion activists.
In Australia, lawmakers in the state of Victoria are considering legislation that would force Christian hospitals to kill patients through abortions and assisted suicides in order to continue receiving taxpayer funding, according to Vision Christian Media.
Reason Party leader MP Fiona Patten said she plans to introduce the bill Wednesday, claiming religious hospitals are “mistreating” patients by refusing to do abortions and assisted suicides.
“I am moving legislation to protect and extend fundamental human rights currently being denied in public hospitals,” Patten said, according to the Australian news outlet ABC. “The health system is mistreating those who fund it.”
According to Vision, Patten mentioned the Catholic-based Mercy Health system, which runs hospitals in Werribee and Heidelberg, as a target of her legislation. Mercy Health would lose all taxpayer funding under her bill unless it abandons its pro-life mission.
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The mission of the Catholic health network includes caring “for mothers and babies from conception, through pregnancy and birth” and for “people of all ages who are diagnosed with incurable or terminal illness through inpatient and community-based palliative and end-of-life care.”
On its website, Mercy Health says it refuses to destroy human lives in abortions and assisted suicides “in accordance with the Hippocratic tradition of medicine.”
“We aim to do no harm, to relieve pain, to provide compassionate care for the whole person and to never abandon those in our care,” the Catholic health system states.
Loss of religious freedom for pro-life medical workers is a growing problem across the world.
In 2021, the European Union approved a radical pro-abortion document that describes abortion as “essential healthcare” and advocates against the conscience rights of medical workers, portraying their refusal to help abort unborn babies as a “denial of medical care.”
In May, a new talking points memo from the United States House Pro-Choice Caucus adopted the same language, telling lawmakers to say “refusal of care/denial of care laws” instead of conscience protections.
Then, last week, the Biden administration unveiled a proposed new rule that reinterprets federal law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “termination of pregnancy”—an action that could force physicians and hospitals to perform abortions and employers to cover abortions in their health insurance plans.
Concerns about ending conscience protections for pro-life medical workers are growing in Ireland, Spain and other parts of the world, too.
