President Obama promised during the 2008 campaign to end the “politics of division,” but his decision to eliminate the “conscience clause” in federal regulation for medical professionals and his nomination of a woman who calls mothers “fetal containers” to head the White House Office of Legal Counsel is as explosively divisive as it gets. The president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind President Bush’s 2008 executive order protecting medical professionals from retaliation for refusing to participate in certain procedures against their will. This takes the choice out of “choice” for doctors, nurses and pharmacists and sets a dangerous precedent. This decision came only weeks after Obama overturned the Bush policy barring U.S. tax dollars being used to pay for abortions overseas. The result is that now Americans opposed to abortion are forced to pay for them abroad and here at home in hundreds of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics that benefit from federal funds. Forcing medical caregivers to violate personal religious and moral values is of the same coercive cloth. Dr. John Bruchalski, who runs a no-abortion OB/GYN practice in Fairfax County, summed it up: “If conscience is compromised, freedom becomes a farce.”
Less than a week before HHS’ 30-day public comment period expired, Illinois Circuit Court Judge John Belz upheld the conscience rights of pharmacists in Obama’s home state to refuse to dispense abortion-inducing drugs. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the American Center for Law and Justice in response to an executive order by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The disgraced former governor’s order was payback for millions of dollars raised for Democrats like Obama and Blago by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other pro-abortion groups. So it’s no surprise that former NARAL attorney Dawn Johnsen has been nominated for a top White House job despite her insulting and misogynist characterization in a federal court case of mothers as “losers in the contraceptive lottery.”
Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser, who advocates a Senate filibuster of Johnsen’s nomination, condemned her “unacceptable disdain for commonsense abortion restrictions and motherhood in general.” Even pro-choice Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, who voted against a failed Senate amendment to keep the conscience clause in place, couldn’t stomach Johnsen’s radical rantings, calling them “beyond the pale.” Obama’s attempts to eliminate conscientious objection is similarly beyond the pale. It’s up to Congress and the courts to stop an administration that shows increasing disdain for constitutional rights. With decisions like these, it is no surprise that Pew Research Center now finds that President Barack Obama “has the most polarized early job approval of any president” since the survey was started four decades ago.
