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President Barack Obama has not yet decided whether to go forward with a proposed regulation under the health care law he signed last year that would force Catholic individuals and institutions to act against the teachings of the Catholic church. In August, Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius proposed a regulation--that would take affect next fall--that would require all health care plans to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including abortifacients. The proposed regulation includes a very narrow religious exemption that does not cover individual Catholics, or Catholic universities, hospitals or charitable institutions.

In a letter to several pro-life groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s decision to drop some of the conscience protections for medical professionals, the administration is defending the decision. Several pro-life groups sent a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warning her of the alarming effects on patients that will follow the Obama administration’s recent move to strip the medical community of key conscience protections on abortion. As LifeNews.com reported in February, the Obama administration overturned some of the conscience protections the Bush administration put in place to protect pro-life medical workers who don’t want to be involved in certain...

Feds asked to ensure Catholic hospitals follow lawThe American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women. By Rob Stein The Washington Post Originally published Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:00 PM The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Wednesday asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women, saying the refusal by religiously affiliated hospitals to provide abortion and other services is an increasing problem. In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the ACLU...

Obama Admin Working to Rescind Conscience Rights on Abortion Hartford, CT -- The Obama administration is still working to overturn conscience rights for medical professionals on abortion that were put in place at the tail end of the Bush administration. http://LifeNews.com/nat-6929

Petula Dvorark, Washington Post's designated church-basher, commemorated the closure of a Virginian "pro-life" pharmacy with snide glee in her April 13 column. "The Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly proudly and purposefully limited what it would stock on its shelves. But it turns out that no birth control pills, no condoms, no porn, no tobacco and even no makeup added up to one thing: No customers," Dvorak wrote. "John T. Bruchalski, president of Divine Mercy Care and the doctor who opened the pharmacy, then had to close it, said he wanted a place where pharmacists ‘could bring their conscience into...

Coakley faces a fierce battle for the senatorial seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy against Republican contender Scott Brown, who is now leading in some polls. However, the election is still too close to call. “In the course of the interview, Martha Coakley demonstrated hostility to conscience rights in general, and to the beliefs of faithful Catholics in particular,” stated John F. Brehany, Ph.D., S.T.L., executive director of the CMA. Of course, the irony is obvious to any observer. Coakley claims to be a Catholic Christian. Yet, she seems to be one of those whom my good friend and Catholic...

Over the past fifty years, the purposes and practices of medicine have changed radically. Where medical ethics was once life-affirming, today’s treatments and medical procedures increasingly involve the legal taking of human life. The litany is familiar: More than one million pregnancies are extinguished each year in the United States, thousands late-term. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, Washington, and, as this is written, Montana via a court ruling (currently on appeal to the state supreme court). One day, doctors may be authorized to kill patients with active euthanasia, as they do already in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg....

Madison, Wis., Aug 23, 2009 / 02:13 am (CNA).- The bishops of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference (WCC) have issued a statement to the state’s Catholic faithful expressing their “deep concern” about a state provision that requires providers of health insurance include contraceptive services. The rule will force Catholic dioceses and other agencies to pay for a “gravely immoral” service, the conference says.A provision in the new state budget mandates the coverage as a “benefit.”Signatories of the August 20 WCC letter were Bishop of Green Bay David L. Ricken, Bishop of Madison Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of La Crosse Jerome...

The nation’s Catholic bishops have told Congress that they oppose H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, as it currently stands, because the health-care reform bill would mandate funding and insurance coverage for abortion. In an August 11 letter to members of the House of Representatives, Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the pro-life committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (U.S.C.C.B.), told lawmakers that health-care reform must “respect human life and rights of conscience in the context of abortion.” “Much-needed reform must not become a vehicle for promoting an ‘abortion rights’ agenda or reversing longstanding policies against federal funding...

Madrid, Spain, Aug 20, 2009 / 01:55 pm (CNA).- Dr. Esteban Rodriguez, spokesman for the organization Right to Life (Derecho a Vivir) in Spain, responded yesterday to comments by the country’s Minister of Justice, Francisco Caamano, who said there was no room for a conscience clause in the new law on abortion.  “We are willing to go to jail rather than following a criminal law, Rodriguez said, “and we are willing to commit the supposed crime of disobedience before the crime of abortion.” “We will not kill our patients, nor will we commit a crime against the public health deliberately harming...

Roman Catholic leaders are stepping up their fight against the Obama administration’s healthcare plans, urging their faithful nationwide to contact legislators to protest abortion provisions in Democratic bills. Catholics who attended Mass Sunday in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, received weekly bulletins with a call to action from Cardinal Justin Rigali, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' pro-life committee. The archdiocese, one of the largest in the nation, serves 1.45 million Catholics. “While this legislation is still in draft form, the request for action at the local level is imperative,” the cardinal wrote. “[W]e must take...

Health Care: Lost in the kerfuffle about a pro-choice president being honored at the University of Notre Dame was the damage the Freedom of Choice Act might do to the nation's health care.Specifically, how many Catholic hospitals will close and how many Catholic doctors will quit if it becomes law? According to the Catholic Health Association, Catholic institutions make up 13% of the nation's nearly 5,000 hospitals, and employ more than 600,000 people. CHA says one of every six Americans hospitalized in the U.S. are cared for in a Catholic hospital. A lot of federal funds flow through the nation's...

Modern liberals have a habit of denying the inevitable consequences of their policies. They refuse to concede that a healthcare bureaucracy created and run by persons who embrace utilitarian views of human life might unsettle Americans concerned that government would, as Senator Chuck Grassley put it this week, “pull the plug on Grandma.” And they seem baffled by those who find President Obama’s professed desire to “reduce the number of abortions” difficult to reconcile with his efforts to subsidize and expand access to them. Worst of all is the left’s position on conscience protections for those with religious or moral...

A state agency responsible directly to Gov. Dave Heineman held up licensing rules for professional counselors and social workers last winter, forcing licensing board members to work out compromise language related to serving homosexual clients. The Legislature and Nebraskans have not wanted equal protection for homosexuals, Dr. Joann Schaefer said last week as she explained her insistence that the state licensing board for counselors and social workers work out a compromise with the Nebraska Catholic Conference on licensing rules. The controversy began because “sexual orientation” was to be covered in a new anti-discrimination clause in proposed new rules for licensed...

The most overturned appellate court has teed up another case for the Supreme Court to consider — and likely soon. The 9th Circuit overturned an injunction in a district court case, allowing the state of Washington to force a pharmacy to stock and dispense morning-after pills, which causes the abortion of an embryo in the early days of a pregnancy. The pharmacy owners had objected, claiming that the law violated their religious practice:

The L.A. Times reports that "pharmacists are obliged to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they are personally opposed to the 'morning after' contraceptive on religious grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. In a case that could affect policy across the western U.S., a supermarket pharmacy owner in Olympia, Wash., failed in a bid to block 2007 regulations that required all Washington pharmacies to stock and dispense the pills. Family-owned Ralph's Thriftway and two pharmacists employed elsewhere sued Washington state officials over the requirement. The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which...

(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.

Some doctors who oppose abortion say that if President Obama repeals controversial Bush administration regulations that allow doctors to refuse to provide care that conflicts with their beliefs, they would rather quit their practice than provide care that violates their conscience. Doctors who oppose abortion and, in some cases, birth control pills say they may stop providing care if the Obama administration follows through on threats to repeal controversial Bush administration regulations aimed at allowing health care workers to refuse to provide care that conflicts with their beliefs. Opponents of the rules point out that those health care workers have...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- In a Thursday afternoon interview with members of various Catholic publications, President Barack Obama defended himself from criticism over his pro-abortion record. He said he supports a conscience clause on abortion but gave a joking response to a question about Notre Dame.According to a National Catholic Register report, Obama talked about his upcoming visit with Pope Benedict XVI and said he looked forward to taking with him about unrelated political issues.Father Owen Kearns, editor in chief and publisher of the Register, said each member of the Catholic press was allowed to ask one question and...

It seems one man’s religious freedom is another man’s “ridiculous prejudice.” One government official fumed that Catholic doctors were refusing to perform abortions-abortions that were perfectly legal. He wrote in a memo: “After all, these scruples are in most cases nothing but ridiculous prejudices . . . One is tempted to ask: where does state authority come in these cases, or else, is the state, perhaps, not anxious to assert its authority in this particular instance?” Well, Nazi Germany was seldom hesitant to assert its authority, even over religion and individual conscience. As described in the June/July issue of First...