Michelle Malkin
Posted on 12/27/2010 10:33:15 AM PST by neverdem
The ACLU's Unholy War on Catholic Hospitals
Will a federal emergency-medical-treatment law be rewritten to mandate that all hospitals provide abortions?
Ho, ho, ho! Just in time for Christmas, the American Civil Liberties Union has launched a new salvo against people of faith. Even as billions around the world celebrate the birth of Christ, joyless, abortion-obsessed secularists never take a holiday.
On Wednesday, the ACLU sent a letter to federal health officials urging the government to force Catholic hospitals in the U.S. to perform abortions in violation of their core moral commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn. They’re counting on sympathetic Obama rationing czar Donald Berwick — a recess appointee whose radical views on wealth and health redistribution were never vetted by Congress — to dictate which religious principles hospital operators can and cannot follow.
The ACLU reiterated its call for a federal probe — read: fishing expedition — of Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide “emergency” contraception and abortions. In practice, of course, every request for abortion is an “emergency” to the Left.
The Catholic Church makes clear that it is morally permissible under certain circumstances to treat directly the cause of the mother’s medical condition, even if those efforts unintentionally and indirectly cost the baby’s life. But Catholic health providers must never directly trade one life for another.
Civil-liberties activists have a particular vendetta against Phoenix’s devout Catholic bishop, Thomas Olmsted, who recently revoked the Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed several direct abortions, provided birth-control pills, and presided over sterilizations against the church’s ethical and religious directives for health care. “It would be unfaithful to pretend the institution is still Catholic,” Olmsted concluded.
“The dioceses cannot be permitted to dictate who lives and who dies in Catholic-owned hospitals,” the ACLU’s lawyers fumed in response.
But shall it be left to the ACLU and Obamacare bureaucrats to determine the Catholicity of a Catholic hospital?
And shall it be left to litigious secularists to sabotage the First Amendment rights of religious-based health-care entities with impunity?
No.
The ACLU now seeks to unilaterally rewrite a federal emergency-medical-treatment law passed by Congress in 1986 to mandate that all hospitals provide abortions. But for more than three decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, federal law has firmly established strong conscience protections for individual health-care providers and hospitals who are reluctant or unwilling to “counsel, suggest, recommend, assist or in any way participate in the performance of abortions or sterilizations contrary to or consistent with” their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”
As the Washington-based Becket Fund, a public-interest law firm that defends the free expression of all religious traditions, pointed out to the feds: “The ACLU has no business radically re-defining the meaning of emergency health care, just as it has no business demanding that religious doctors and nurses violate their faith by performing a procedure they believe is tantamount to murder. Forcing religious hospitals to perform abortions not only undermines this nation’s integral commitment to conscience rights, it violates the numerous federal laws that recognize and protect those rights.”
According to the Catholic Health Association, Catholic health-care facilities form the largest not-for-profit health-service sector in the United States — serving one out of every six patients in America and providing 15 percent of the hospital-bed capacity in the country. Moreover, Catholic health-care institutions employ about 540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time workers.
If the abortion lobby gets its way, faithful Catholic hospitals and Catholic medical professionals who follow their consciences and adhere to canon law could see their federal funding yanked. And radical social engineers may well force the shutdown of countless Catholic hospitals at a time when Obamacare costs and consequences are already wreaking havoc on the health industry.
Fewer jobs, less access to health care, less freedom. and more lives lost: Merry Christmas from the ACLU.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Has the Pope been made aware of this? I sure hope so because I’m positive he will have something to say about it.
OK, I get the part about "emergency" abortions but what the heck is "emergency contraception"?
A man and woman go to the E.R. and say, "give us a condom, we are about to have sex"?
RU-486, et al
Unless life is devalued, socialism cannot be implemented. Property rights start with sovereignty over one’s self. Property rights, and thus the sanctity of life, are a problem for communists. To the left, abortion is a sacrament, because it reduces human life to a disposable conglomerate of cells. If life itself has no intrinsic spiritual value or resulting protections, then how would an estate? or a 401K; or a bank account; or land? or food? or any other personal possession?
The government could then own all, control all, and ensure that life is “fair”. The goal of “Economic and social justice” (i.e., communism”) demands that fetuses be exterminated in mass numbers. Killing life envigorates the STATE, the god of the LEFT.
“Emergency contraception” is the politically correct term for taking an abortifient medication after unprotected sex, in order to abort any baby that might have been conceived.
And we wonder what is wrong with our country. Does anyone remember what Sodom and Gomorrah was all about?
Amazing how fascist our government is—to dictate what religious ideas will be allowed in our country—one founded and immersed in Christian ideology. They are abolishing the First Amendment using a back door method. The same with the cultural Marxists using homosexuality to also destroy the religious freedom of Christians and Jews and making the Bible “hate speech”. Back door to forcing pagan, atheism worldview onto our children and society. Disgusting.
Fascist Marxists who created PC to take down everything great about America when honor, integrity and character actually meant something.
“Emergency contraception” is the ‘borts’ usual lying euphemism for the morning-after pill. It’s not only not an “emergency,” half the time it’s not even “contraception.” If ovulation has already occurred. conception can have already taken place, so it’s new-baby-pesticide. For people who think they, their partners and their offspring are a category of insect life.
Personhood bump.
Not a single child that the ACLU helped kill will ever have the opportunity to enjoy a single “civil liberty.”
Until the word "evil" is brought back into our culture and used regularly, we are in danger of losing everything. Evil is quite happy to "not exist", for under those conditions it can do its most insidious, destructive work. Even more frightful yet is the fact that many Americans today don't believe that God exists either.
Yes. It was about a society that was so corrupt that the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure completely destroyed the protection of the unalienable rights of the person.
Unless life is devalued, socialism cannot be implemented. Property rights start with sovereignty over one’s self. Property rights, and thus the sanctity of life, are a problem for communists. To the left, abortion is a sacrament, because it reduces human life to a disposable conglomerate of cells. If life itself has no intrinsic spiritual value or resulting protections, then how would an estate? or a 401K; or a bank account; or land? or food? or any other personal possession?Excellent post. Excellent summary of how abortion fits in with socialism.The government could then own all, control all, and ensure that life is “fair”. The goal of “Economic and social justice” (i.e., communism”) demands that fetuses be exterminated in mass numbers. Killing life envigorates the STATE, the god of the LEFT.
Thanks, Sam. I thought it was worth the time to connect the dots. We are up against a demonic enemy whose tentacles are everywhere. Our entire Western, Judeo-
Christian culture is threatened: family structure, free market system, history, traditions, morals, ethics, individualism, liberty, freedom, English common law, Constitution, and religion.
The barbarians are already within the gates. So all of us should take every opportunity to clarify and focus on the goals and tactics of the enemy. This is a war to save our way of life.
To which Koch replied, "WE need them" and worked something out.
Eventually Catholics are going to have to give up medicine all together.
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