On Saturday the Houston Chronicle ran a story originally published in the Washington Post on January 30 by Rob Stein. He reports:
More than a dozen states are considering new laws to protect health workers who do not want to provide care that conflicts with their personal beliefs, a surge of legislation that reflects the intensifying tension between asserting individual religious values and defending patients' rights.
This paragraph is an example of the ongoing misnomers prevalent in the media these days. Notice how the only people in this scenario who are motivated by "personal beliefs" or "individual values" are the people who are pro-life. Whereas the folks on the other side of the debate are motivated by more universal principles: they just want "care" and seek to "defend patients' rights."
Mr Stein's characterization of the right to life and right of conscience as "individual religious values" betrays the attitude of secular culture, and the task of pro-lifers--namely, to demonstrate that the right to life is not an individual religious value but a universal moral principle, one shared by different religions and non-religious alike, that is crucial to the common good. At no point is it even mentioned that those who oppose right of conscience laws are equally motivated by personal moral beliefs. Why not I wonder?
The issue is getting messier. The broad measures to protect conscience come as lawsuits are being filed by both pro-lifers and pro-choicers against different companies in the United States.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday Feb 1 that three women are suing Wal-Mart in Massachusetts for scandalously failing to stock their pharmacy shelves with the morning after pill. The lawsuit seeks to force the 44 Wal Marts and four Sam's Club stores to carry them.
At the same time, the American Center for Law and Justice is suing Walgreen's for firing four pharmacists who refused to dispense the morning after pill because of "religious objections."
A few days following the flurry of stories regarding the right of conscience, Benedict XVI celebrated the Italian Pro-Life Day. During a pastoral visit to the Vatican parish of St Anne's, he presented a perfect frame in which to view the situations currently ongoing in the United States. The Holy Father said that in modern times "two mentalities are opposed irreconcilably." Said he, "One of the two mentalities considers that human life is in the hands of man, the other recognizes that it is in the hands of God."
It is sometimes believed that people who are motivated by "personal beliefs" or "individual religious values" are in a sense guilty of being self-centered and shortsighted. They do not have the best interests of others at heart. They are merely interested in keeping their own noses clean while other people suffer as a result. Yet there is no Catholic or Christian social teaching that is not directly aimed at the common good of society. The Church's teaching on family and on life issues is in fact crucial for the wellbeing of the global community. And whenever society has abandoned the Christian teaching on these issues, disaster has followed.
Thus individual religious values are not individual at all. Religious believers are precisely the ones able to look beyond the material world and the immediate future to see the long-term ramifications of certain actions, because they recognize that excluding God from the picture leaves the creature without the Creator. And as Benedict says, “[W]ithout the Creator the creature would disappear." The only thing “individual” about religious values is whether or not these values are recognized. Whether or not they exist does not vary among persons.
For pharmacists and doctors who happen to recognize the radical individuality of the unborn child, they have their own Hippocratic Oaths to consider. To say nothing of the side effects of emergency contraception on the woman herself, it obviously would not be very healthy for the tiny human being attempting to enter the mother's womb.
It is precisely in the careful discernment of the moral ramifications of their actions that doctors and pharmacists safeguard the rights of the patients whom they serve. That is the point of the right of conscience. In the long run patients and consumers like the women in Massachusetts only harm themselves and their posterity by seeking to impose morality on those who disagree with them.
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