See all our coverage of the November 2011 Mandate Hearing here.

This testimony was submitted to the US House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health on November 2, 2011. It is written testimony for the hearing record on “Do New Health Law Mandates Threaten Conscience Rights and Access to Care?”

The article was amended at 12:38 p.m., Thursday, November 3rd to correct links in one paragraph.

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Pallone and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for this opportunity to present testimony on behalf of Catholics for Choice on this important question of conscience rights and access to comprehensive healthcare.

For nearly 40 years, Catholics for Choice has served as a voice for Catholics who believe that the Catholic tradition supports a woman’s moral and legal right to follow her conscience on matters of sexuality and reproductive health. Throughout the world, we strive to be an expression of Catholicism as it is lived by ordinary people. We are part of the great majority of the faithful in the Catholic church who disagrees with the dictates of the Vatican on matters related to sex, marriage, family life and motherhood. We represent those who believe that Catholic teachings on conscience mean that every individual must follow his or her own conscience — and respect others’ right to do the same.

Certainly, at Catholics for Choice, we are no strangers to the intersection of religion, sex and politics. While religious voices and traditions are a vital part of public discourse, religious views should not be given disproportionate weight in public policy discussions. When this happens the lives of men and women can suffer greatly. We believe in a world where all voices, the voices of the religious and of the secular, of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, are heard in public policy discussions.

This hearing seeks to answer the question: Do new health law mandates threaten conscience rights and access to care? I firmly believe the requirements under the Affordable Care Act, and the slate of regulations being created to implement it, infringe on no one’s conscience, demand no one change her or his religious beliefs, discriminate against no man or woman, put no additional economic burden on the poor, interfere with no one’s medical decisions, compromise no one’s health — that is, if you consider the law without refusal clauses. When the question is asked in light of these unbalanced and ever-expanding clauses, the answer becomes yes, it would do all these things. When burdened by such refusal clauses, the new health law absolutely threatens the conscience rights of every patient seeking care for these restricted services and of every provider who wishes to provide comprehensive care to their patients. These restrictions go far beyond their intent of protecting conscience rights for all by eliminating access to essential healthcare for many, if not most patients, especially in the area of reproductive healthcare services. This will make it harder for many working Americans to get the healthcare they need at a cost they can afford.

The Affordable Care Act has many positive elements to it. Millions will now be able to access insurance coverage for their health needs and, with the basic level of coverage required under the new law, these newly insured and the millions of those better insured will now have greater access to a wider range of services than ever before. However, the law includes a refusal clause which has been expanded in the past decades to threaten the consciences of both those who seek to receive and those who want to provide services. Advocates of these expansive refusal clauses claim these are necessary to protect conscience rights. Others believe that refusal clauses such as these are simply part of attempts to derail the Affordable Care Act and to curb access to reproductive healthcare services entirely. Moreover, proposals to expand existing refusal clauses increase threats to the conscience rights of patients and providers by including not just abortion but also family planning services and, should some get their way, any other service deemed “unacceptable” by a tiny minority.

In recent years, under the guise of protecting religious freedom and “conscience rights” we have seen a dramatic upswing in attempts to expand the scope of refusal clauses, their application, and the entities able to utilize them. These new, ever-broader refusal clauses do far more than allow those healthcare professionals or social service providers with conscience objections to opt out. Instead, they are effectively being used as a means to refuse some treatments, medications, benefits and services to all comers.

These expansions have increased not only the services that may be refused—including reproductive health services as well as insurance coverage for those services and even training for medical professionals—but they have also the number of those who may claim these protections. Almost everyone, including most Catholics, agrees that it is reasonable to allow healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses and pharmacists, to opt out of providing essential reproductive healthcare services and medications to which they conscientiously object. There is no doubt that there are times when the conscience of an individual doctor, nurse or pharmacist may conflict with the wishes orneeds of a patient. This often happens in cases related to abortion. Except in emergency situations, it is reasonable and indeed prudent to allow those who are opposed to abortion to opt out of providing the service. In these situations, women seeking these services should not have to worry about the religious and moral beliefs of their healthcare providers interfering with the provision of the best possible care. Therefore, it is in the best interests of all that only medical professionals committed to providing such services do so. Women need support and compassionate care when they access reproductive healthcare services, not judgment and disdain.

When this is not possible, a reasonable ethical fallback is for the institution to guarantee timely referrals to ensure that patients receive continuity of care without facing an undue burden, such as traveling long distances or encountering additional barriers to obtaining the desired services. Moreover, good practice should also compel a religious institution to make sure that the consciences of both the healthcare (or social services) provider and the patient (or client) are accommodated by having policies in place that enable individuals to receive whatever medications they are prescribed, procedures they require or services they seek.

Like many Catholics, I accept that conscience has a role to play in providing healthcare services, but recent moves to expand conscience protections beyond the simple right for individual healthcare providers to refuse to provide services to which they personally object go too far. Increasingly, demands and regulatory proposals attempt to grant that option to an institution or any individual along the spectrum of care, funding and coverage. It is incredible to suggest that a hospital or an insurance plan has a conscience. Granting institutions, or entities like these, legal protection for the rights of conscience that properly belongs to individuals is an affront to our ideals of conscience and religious freedom.

Allowing religious institutions to dictate the medical care available to their employees or religiouslyaffiliated organizations to dictate what services their beneficiaries are allowed to access would encroach on the individual consciences of those seeking care and assistance. Refusal clauses such as these fly in the face of true religious freedom by promoting the interests of certain elements of particular religions over the consciences and beliefs of individuals. They ignore the moral agency of the many who do not share the beliefs of a particular religious ideology. If allowed to stand, these refusal clauses do nothing but endanger many women’s access to the healthcare they need. When codified into law at the federal or state level, these “protections” actually constitute state-sponsored discrimination against women based on where they are employed, where and how they buy health insurance and where they seek to receive care.

Today, the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women in the US who have used a form of contraception banned by the Vatican have exercised their religious freedom and followed their consciences in making the decision to use contraception. Thus, they are in line with the totality of Catholic teachings, if not with the views of the hierarchy. The problem is very clearly with the Catholic hierarchy and not the Catholic church, which includes the vast majority of the 68 million Catholics in the United States who use and support the availability of comprehensive reproductive healthcare services for all those who choose to utilize them.

Having failed to convince Catholics in the pews, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other conservative Catholic organizations are now attempting to impose their personal beliefs on all people by seeking special protection for their “conscience rights.“ They claim to represent all Catholics when, in truth, theirs is the minority view. The bishops have identified several sympathetic high-profile allies in healthcare, education and social service provision to assist them in promoting their demands, but these allies are heavily reliant on the bishops for funding and prestige. Hospitals and colleges can lose their Catholic designation at the bishop’s whim, as happened recently in Phoenix, Arizona.

At a Catholic hospital in Phoenix, medical professionals acted to save the life of a pregnant woman by performing a life-saving abortion on a mother of four. The local bishop decided that his authority over the hospital allowed him to second-guess the medical decisions they made and he stripped the hospital of its Catholic designation. This is antithetical to the Catholic social justice tradition, which would not leave a woman’s life out of any healthcare equation.

What occurred in Phoenix helps to illustrate the problem with the bishops’ intrusion into medical decisions. The personal and professional freedom to make healthcare decisions is being threatened by expansive refusal clauses. The exemptions that the USCCB and other conservative Catholic organizations are demanding do not offer any more protection for religious freedom, but rather impede the religious freedom of millions of Americans, taking reproductive healthcare options away from everybody.

The USCCB and some Catholic organizations, many that receive taxpayer money, are asking to be allowed to:

• deny condoms as part of HIV outreach;

• ban employees and their dependents from getting the benefit of no-cost contraceptive coverage that other insured Americans enjoy;

• opt out of providing emergency contraception to victims of sexual violence who come to Catholic hospitals for help; and

• deny abortion care to everybody — even those women whose lives are threatened by their pregnancy.

They claim that they are representing all Catholics, but this is not true. The majority of Catholics support equal access to contraceptive services and oppose policies that impede upon that access.