Several advocates for women’s health said the nurses are protected from having to directly participate in abortion but have an obligation to care for women otherwise.
“These are health-care professionals who work at a publicly funded hospital saying that they do not want to do the job they were hired to do, including caring for a woman before or after surgery,” said Jennifer Dalven of the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project. “People have a right to their beliefs, but that shouldn’t give them the right to discriminate against patients who need medical care.”
Susan Berke Fogel of the National Health Law Program, a Washington-based legal advocacy group, agreed.
“If it’s directly participating in an abortion, then the law says they should be able to refuse without being penalized,” Fogel said. “It can’t be just, ‘She’s there to have an abortion’ therefore the person can refuse to even talk to her, refuse to look at her chart or, say, let visitors come up to see her. A hospital has to be able to operate in an orderly fashion. We can’t be having individuals deciding for themselves where the boundary is around what it means to ‘assist.’ ”
In a brief filed last week, the hospital said it would add about $280,000 to the facility’s annual budget if the changes in the nurses’ duties were not permitted. The hospital also charged that the nurses were putting patients undergoing abortions at risk by refusing to care for them even in emergency situations.
The hospital argued that “the routine, peripheral care that plaintiffs are now expected to provide . . . cannot reasonably be construed as assisting in the performance of abortions” and that state and federal laws do not apply. The hospital also denied having threatened to dismiss any of the nurses. Officials had offered to accommodate the nurses’ objections by transferring them elsewhere, according to the brief.
In February, President Obama rescinded most of a controversial federal regulation put in place by President George W. Bush to protect health-care workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds. The rule was widely interpreted as shielding workers who object to a range of medical services, such as playing any role whatsoever in abortions, providing birth control pills or even performing in vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.
Obama’s new rule, however, left intact long-standing “conscience” protections for doctors and nurses who do not want to perform abortion or sterilization procedures. It also retained the process for health workers whose rights are violated to file complaints with the Department of Health and Human Services.
Bowman would not say whether he planned to file a complaint, but he said the original Bush regulation might have helped protect the nurses.
“The more regulations that exist to enforce federal law protecting conscience rights, the better,” Bowman said.
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