An inconvenient conscience

CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said President Barack Obama supports existing federal laws that prevent federally funded health care providers from forcing doctors and pharmacists who morally oppose abortion from either performing the procedure or providing abortion-inducing medication.

But Obama opposes a regulation put into place by the Bush administration that would require those federally funded providers to certify compliance with the law, Sebelius said.

On March 10, the Obama administration submitted to the Federal Register a proposal to rescind the “conscience clause” rule entitled “Ensuring That Department of Health and Human Services Funds Do Not Support Coercive or Discriminatory Policies or Practices in Violation of Federal Law.”

“There really hasn’t been a change in status of what the president proposed,” Sebelius told CNSNews.com during a conference call with reporters on Monday. “The president continues to support the underlying law.

“He felt the regulation issued in the final days of the Bush administration was overly broad and jeopardizes critical health services for women,” she said. [reference]

First they argued that the newer additions from the Bush administration were not needed because existing laws covered it. Though they never explained why this set of guidelines need to be repealed if they are just duplicates. No reason to go through this whole thing of public comment and then repeal if this was so. They could be just left in place.

The key to what the Obama administration is really saying lies in “jeopardizes critical health services for women.” They pretend to say that their will be no change in conscience protection while at the same time saying it jeopardizes health care services for women. Obviously to provide the level of so-called “women’s health care” somebody has to have their conscience violated to do so – at least according to their action. Protection of conscience is just fine as long as it is a politically correct conscience. Otherwise you must bow down to the state and do their will in the name of “women’s health care” which always means contraception and abortion.

I really find this whole thing despicable and even worse how little of an outcry relatively to this usurpation to the human conscience there is. Ironically it is often liberals who appeal to the protection of conscience even if it is an ill-formed one. But have a properly formed conscience that respects the actual dignity of humans being and God’s plan for human sexuality and you have an inconvenient conscience that must be attacked into submission. God help us.

Plus there was this story yesterday

Although 30,000 of the approximately 49,000 comments on the National Institutes of Health’s draft guidelines on human embryonic stem-cell research opposed any federal funding of such research, those responses were “deemed not responsive to the question put forth,” according to the acting director of NIH.

“We did not ask them whether to fund such funding, but how it should be funded,” said Dr. Raynard S. Kington in a telephone briefing with the media July 6.

But Richard M. Doerflinger, associate director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, said it was “disingenuous (for Kington) to say that comments criticizing the guidelines overall were to be ignored.” [reference]

We seek input that matches are pre-drawn conclusion.