Health Care, Fabrications and Religious Freedom

by Fr. Roger Landry - August 28, 2009

As we wrote about earlier this month, Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, on behalf of the U.S. Bishops, has specified two main areas of concern with respect to the health care reforms being proposed by the legislative and executive branches in Washington. The first is unequivocal assurance that abortions will not be covered. The second is that explicit inclusion of conscience protections so that health care providers will not have to participate in practices that violate the well-informed conscience of any nurse, doctor or pharmacist.

In the past few weeks, there have confirmations of these concerns on both scores.

On August 19, President Obama, speaking to the National Council of Churches, claimed that those who say that abortion will be covered in health care reforms are bearing false witness. He accused them of "fabrications" and "distractions" in order to "discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and religious obligation."

If we look merely at the letter of the reform proposals, the President is correct: none of the proposals actually mention the word abortion. Abortion supporters, like the President, know that abortion is justly a dirty word, that most Americans would never accept having their tax dollars pay for others to end the lives of their innocent, unborn children. So much like abortion supporters at the United Nations, who speak euphemistically about abortion in terms of undefined "rights" to "reproductive health services" in order later to have a U.N. agency "interpret" that right to include abortion, so the President and various pro-abortion Congressional leaders have sought to pretend that abortion is not included, all the while introducing and maintaining vague language that the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services or abortion-supporting activist judges can use to mandate abortion coverage.

When pro-life members of Congress have called the president's and democratic leaders' bluff by introducing amendments that would bar the coverage of abortions, the amendments have failed in both the House and the Senate. If there really were no intention of using the health care reforms to introduce access and coverage for abortions, why would these amendments — which would have confirmed the President's assertions — not have passed?

It is the President and his abortion-supporting collaborators, not Cardinal Rigali and the Catholic bishops, who need to examine themselves on bearing false witness.

With regard to protections for the religious freedom of individuals and institutions, there is a portentous situation that has just come to light in Belmont, North Carolina. In 2007, Belmont Abbey College, a small, faithful Catholic institution linked to the Benedictine Belmont Abbey, discovered that its private health care policy for employees included coverage for abortion, contraception and voluntary sterilization. The college immediately eliminated those unethical provisions. "As a Roman Catholic institution," president William Thierfelder said, "Belmont Abbey College is not able to and will not offer nor subsidize medical services that contradict the clear teaching of the Catholic Church." Eight employees complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging that the decision to exclude prescription contraceptives discriminated against women. In March, the EEOC District Office in Charlotte sided with the college and closed the case without any finding of wrongdoing.

Earlier this month, however, the college received a letter from Reuben Daniels, Jr., director of the Charlotte EEOC District Office stating that the case has been reopened, that the college is in violation of federal law, and that if the college does not back down and achieve an acceptable compromise with the complainants, the EEOC will recommend court action. "By denying prescription contraception drugs," Daniels wrote, the college "is discriminating based on gender since only females take oral prescription drugs. By denying coverage, men are not affected, only women."

It's true that only women are presently affected, because there aren't prescription male contraceptives on the market, although some are being tested; what is totally clear, however, is that there is no intention to discriminate against women; if there were male contraceptives available, those would not be covered either. The purported discrimination is just a convenient ploy to force the College to cover contraceptives against its Catholic principles and the consciences of the monks and College leaders.

President Thierfelder says that he was told by local EEOC officials that the about face was dictated by Washington, which is something that makes the case both chilling and significant as we continue looking at the federal health care reforms and the absence of conscience protections.

"From a religious freedom standpoint," Thierfielder commented in an article on lifesitenews.com, you don't have religious freedom. To try to make us change [our beliefs], there's something very wrong with that. I think that's why this has garnered so much attention, especially with the health care debates that are going on right now and with all the things that are going on with Catholic hospitals. What they are basically saying is, 'If you're Catholic, or if you are of any faith, it doesn't mean anything. You're going to do what the government tells you to do.'"

As Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society noted in an article about the situation in the Wall Street Journal, "That's the rub: increasingly it is clear to Catholics and other religious groups that without very clear exemptions for religious employers — and conscience protections for individual doctors, nurses, pharmacists — federal health-care laws and guidelines could severely restrict religious freedom in the U.S."

Reilly added that the issue is more than about contraception and a small Catholic College. "Perhaps there are those who would say that this is an issue for only a minority of religious people. Catholics are nearly alone in their objection to contraceptives — and many Catholics regularly violate the church's teaching on the issue. But consider abortion. The EEOC says that pregnancy discrimination does not apply to an employer's refusal to cover abortion expenses, 'except where the life of the mother is endangered.' When will a federal court argue that if insurance coverage to prevent pregnancy is, by inference, mandated by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, then why not abortion to end a pregnancy?"

Thierfelder acknowledged that the fight may end up in court and said that under no circumstances will the College do what is immoral no matter how much pressure the government puts on it to support a culture of death. "All of us need to have moral courage in today's world," he said. "We are so resolute in our commitment to the teachings of the Catholic Church that there is no possible way we would ever deviate from it, and if it came down to it, we would close the school rather than give in. So it is absolute, unequivocal, impossible for us to go against the teachings of the Catholic Church in any way. There is no form of compromise that is possible."

Reilly says that the EEOC's persecution of Belmont Abbey College is a "bad omen for people of faith: we can add the threat to religious liberty to the dangers already presented by government-run health care."

Without clearly-defined conscience protections for individuals and institutions, health care reform can turn out to be a vehicle by which some in government agencies can force their immorality on those of us who, out of informed conscience, disagree with them.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.