browngirl

"The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control."

From a little further down in the article, discussing the proposed rule changes: "Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents providers, said, “The proposed definition of abortion is so broad that it would cover many types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception.”"

This article concurs and provides a PDF of the actual proposal.

Setting reproductive rights aside for a moment, this is also part of the discussion on what is a fair accomodation for a person's religious beliefs. There are people who ~~are spinning this as~~ see this as exactly equivalent to providing a vegetarian meal for a Hindu or allowing a Jewish employee to leave their office job in time to reach home by sunset each Friday. I don't, because that the vegetarian meal and even the employee leaving at 3 every Friday between November and March affect other people's lives to a far lesser degree than being counseled by a nurse who refuses to give one information on abortion, having one's prescription for birth control pills destroyed instead of being filled by a pharmacist, or being left to suffer through a miscarriage by a doctor who believes that one got what one deserved for being pregnant out of wedlock. (All incidents from other people's lives, whom I believed when they related them.)

Looks like I didn't manage to set the reproductive rights aside after all, but my point is that, as much as I believe in the freedom of religion and accomodations designed to facilitate that, I think as a society we may need to set a line beyond which religion ought not to be further accomodated and that one possible location of that line is where religiously accomodating one person results in denying life and/or health to another.

Or, perhaps, entangling this issue with religious freedom is really just a smokescreen designed to make it harder to fight an otherwise blatant attack on reproductive freedom. (Redefining contraception as abortion, WTF.) Like the use of forever-delayed 'environmental impact reviews' to block construction of solar energy plants, it strikes me as a conservative use of originally liberal tactics against the side that originated them. So religious freedom is good, they say: then we must be allowed the religious freedom to block access to abortion and contraception, mustn't we?

How the hell do we fight that? ETA: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/ currently redirects to a letter-writing campaign that goes to the White House inbox. With thanks to