Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

A Bush administration proposal aimed at protecting health-care workers who object to abortion, and to birth-control methods they consider tantamount to abortion, has escalated a bitter debate over the balance between religious freedom and patients’ rights.

The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive.

Conservative groups, abortion opponents and some members of Congress are welcoming the initiative as necessary to safeguard doctors, nurses and other health workers who, they say, are increasingly facing discrimination because of their beliefs or are being coerced into delivering services they find repugnant.

But the draft proposal has sparked intense criticism by family planning advocates, women’s health activists, and members of Congress who say the regulation would create overwhelming obstacles for women seeking abortions and birth control.

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy”—meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.

The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience—that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral, said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing, Brejcha said.

Craig Turczynski traveled from Texas to find ways to help infertile women that do not conflict with his religious beliefs. Cherie LeFevre came from St. Louis to learn how to treat her OB-GYN patients in obedience to her Catholicism. Amie Holmes flew from Ohio so she could practice medicine in conformity with church teachings when she graduates from medical school.

On a journey that would blend the aura of a pilgrimage with the ambience of a medical seminar, the three arrived at an unassuming three-story red-brick building on a quiet side street in this Missouri River city.

Their destination was the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, which has become perhaps the most prominent women’s health center serving Catholics and other doctors, medical students and patients who object for religious reasons to in vitro fertilization, contraceptives and other aspects of modern reproductive medicine.

According to all the tests, the young woman was deep in a vegetative state—completely unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings. But then a team of scientists decided to do an unprecedented experiment, employing sophisticated technology to try to peer behind the veil of her brain injury for any signs of conscious awareness.

Without any hint that she might have a sense of what was happening, the researchers put the woman in a scanner that detects brain activity and told her that in a few minutes they would say the word tennis, signaling her to imagine she was serving, volleying and chasing down balls. When they did, the neurologists were shocked to see her brain light up exactly as an uninjured person’s would. It happened again and again. And the doctors got the same result when they repeatedly cued her to picture herself wandering, room to room, through her own home.

Sandwiched between a swimming pool store and a spice shop on Lee Highway in Fairfax, the Tepeyac Family Center looks like any other suburban doctor’s office. But it isn’t.

The practice combines the best of modern medicine with the healing presence of Jesus Christ, a brochure at the reception desk announces. An image of the Madonna greets every patient. Doctors, nurses and staff members gather to pray each day before the first appointments.

In hospitals and medical practices around the country, doctors and nurses refuse to perform certain medical procedures because of their personal beliefs. Guests on the program discuss the rights of the patient, and whether or not a health care professional’s personal convictions should outweigh his or her professional responsibilities.

Around the United States, health workers and patients are clashing when providers balk at giving care that they feel violates their beliefs, sparking an intense, complex, and often bitter debate over religious freedom vs. patients’ rights.

For example, some anesthesiologists refuse to assist in sterilization procedures, respiratory therapists sometimes object to removing ventilators from terminally ill patients, and gynecologists around the country have declined to prescribe birth control pills.

Legal and political battles have followed. Patients are suing and filing complaints after being spurned. Workers are charging religious discrimination after being disciplined or fired. Congress and more than a dozen states are considering new laws to compel workers to provide care—or, conversely, to shield them from punishment.

In Chicago, an ambulance driver refused to transport a patient for an abortion. In California, fertility specialists rebuffed a gay woman seeking artificial insemination. In Texas, a pharmacist turned away a rape victim seeking the morning-after pill.

Around the United States, health workers and patients are clashing when providers balk at giving care that they feel violates their beliefs, sparking an intense, complex and often bitter debate over religious freedom vs. patients’ rights.

At the Fairfax Community Church in Virginia, the faithful regularly pray for ailing strangers. Same goes at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington and the Islamic Center of Maryland in Gaithersburg.

In churches, mosques, ashrams, healing rooms, prayer groups and homes nationwide, millions of Americans offer prayers daily to heal themselves, family, friends, co-workers and even people found through the Internet. Fueled by the upsurge in religious expression in the United States, prayer is the most common complement to mainstream medicine, far outpacing acupuncture, herbs, vitamins and other alternative remedies.

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. About half of the proposals would shield pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and morning-after pills because they believe the drugs cause abortions. But many are far broader measures that would shelter a doctor, nurse, aide, technician or other employee who objects to any therapy. That might include in-vitro fertilization, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cells and perhaps even providing treatment to gays and lesbians.