Biden Wants to Force Doctors and Nurses to Do Abortions, But We Must Respect Their Pro-Life Beliefs

A new directive announced Jan. 9 by Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services will largely undo a rule set in place by the Trump administration. The Trump policy affirmed the rights of medical workers to refuse to participate in medical services that violated their ethical and religious beliefs, such as dispensing abortion pills and performing abortions, sterilizations, and gender mutilation surgeries on minors.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Counsel Matt Bowman told LifeNews “In its rule, HHS suggests it will continue its misguided use of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to require doctors to perform abortions even though that federal law has no abortion requirement, and conscience laws provide no exception allowing forced performance of abortion.”

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires that emergency departments of a Medicare-receiving hospitals provide emergency care, regardless of the patient’s ability to pay.  For the Biden Justice Department, emergency care must include abortion services.

Thankfully, Biden’s plans faced a number recent setbacks in the Supreme Court, and in D.C. Federal Appeals Court in their efforts to force Idaho and Texas, states with prolife laws, to provide abortion as essential emergency services in hospitals.

However, the new HHS rule is a sure indication the administration will continue to press its agenda to expand access to abortion in states with pro-life laws, and force medical professionals to participate in abortion procedures, and other activities that violate the ethical and moral conscience of many medical professionals.

Bowman points out that even with the temporary legal victories in the Idaho and Texas cases, “countless medical practitioners needlessly suffer threats to their livelihoods and affronts to their faith just for asserting their rights to conscience and religious freedom.”

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In the months and years ahead, as pressure mounts from pro-abortion forces, aligned with sympathetic politicians and judges, we also need to consider the impact of emotional trauma on workers forced to participate in services that violate their conscience, such as abortion.

In our now over 25 years’ work in Rachel’s Vineyard, a program of emotional and spiritual healing after abortion, we have heard the stories of a number of former abortion center staff and medical workers.

A registered nurse, Joann shared that it was her responsibility after the abortion procedure to make sure all the fetal parts were removed from the womb to prevent infection. She had to literally put the broken babies back together to best perform her duties.  Joann experienced classic signs of emotional trauma such as intrusive images of baby body parts, nightmares, anxiety and depression.

James, a physician who performed ultrasounds for an ob-gyn practice that also performed abortions, told us of the intimate relationship he developed with the preborn babies he encountered during his scans. Some of the pregnant mothers would share during the procedure that they were planning to abort their child.  Over time this began to take a toll on his emotional and physical health.

H said the sight of his young children sometimes triggered feelings of grief and loss related to the babies he encountered in his work; children he could not save from abortion. He went on to suffer chronic physical pain that led to a leave of absence from work.

Abortion center nurse Sallie Tisdale was convinced of the moral and social righteousness of her medical service for women. But she was also brutally honest about the darker reality of her work:

“At the end of the day I clean out the suction jars, pouring bloods into the sink, splashing the sides with flecks of tissue. From the sink rises a rich and humid smell, hot, earthy, and moldering; it is the smell of something recently alive beginning to decay.”

Her participation in this macabre activity naturally created internal conflict and emotional trauma that found expression in intense and disturbing nightmares:

“I have fetus dreams, we all do here: Dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. “Let’s do an abortion,” they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe…”

Sallie adds, “Done as well as it can be, [abortion] is still violence—merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death.”

Unlike most abortion advocates, who shy away from talking about the graphic reality of abortion, Sallie was brutally honest. Yet, she struggles to find a morally positive spin on the dark nature of her medical practice, finally arriving at merciful violence.

If a nurse who has no moral or religious objection to the procedure, is so deeply impacted by her exposure to the graphic reality of what abortion does to the preborn baby – what can we expect from those medical workers who have deeply held convictions that abortion is the unjust termination of an innocent human life?

How will this impact a physician who rightly views both a mother and her preborn child as patients, both in need of protection and expert care?

We can expect such medical workers to experience the classic symptoms associated with emotional trauma: Anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation, sleep disturbance, relational and sexual dysfunction, substance abuse and other physical and emotional suffering. These medical professionals will pay a high price as the traumatic fallout impacts their personal and work lives.

Let’s be very clear that conscience protection laws to do not prevent medical professionals from treating women experiencing miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy. Pro-life doctors confirm this truth to counter the misinformation of abortion proponents. Every state with an abortion ban allows treatment for both miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy.

ADF lawyer Matt Bowman shares, “Patients are best served by medical practitioners who are free to act consistent with their oath to ‘do no harm.’ Doctors, nurses, and other medical providers should enjoy this same constitutional protection, free to live and work in a manner consistent with their faith.”  (LifeNews)

Amen!

Patients are also best served by medical practitioners saved from the devastating emotional trauma of forced participation in procedures and services that violate their deeply held religious and ethical beliefs.

LifeNews Note: Kevin Burke, MSS, is a pastoral associate of Priests for Life and co-founder of Rachel’s Vineyard. An expert on men and abortion loss, he is the author of Tears of the Fisherman and co-author of Rivers of Blood/Oceans of Mercy. Theresa Burke, Ph.D., is the founder of Rachel’s Vineyard and a pastoral associate of Priests for Life. She is the co-author of Forbidden Grief and Rivers of Blood, Oceans of Mercy.

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